Fallout 4 vanilla
After almost two hundred hours (active playing time was about: 0,75*190h=142,5h) I put the latest Fallout on the dock. I'd continue with the DLCs whenever there was something and after I had taken a break in general. I did manage to see all the endings and to open all but one ("Benevolent Leader", that required at least Charisma 6 + 2 perks) of the fifty achievements of the base game. To get that I'd need to level up six times, but we'll see if I ever feel like that.
In case someone reads this and is afraid of spoilers, I'm already warning. I'm going to ramble on based on my playthrough experiences. I'm also sorry in advance if this is a bit of a strage read, but I typed this up later afterwards, not live.
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In the end of '15 I was talking about my early game, when I had just met the local BoS section and had helped them a bit. After that I proceeded to explore the northern end of the map (I hadn't dared to cross the river, so I hadn't even been to Diamond City yet).
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| Abernathy Farm - Concorde |
Mapping the north-northeast
I worked my way in the north towards the northeast corner. Along the way I encountered some odd stuff, like a funeral, a village full of raiders under attack by two Deathclaws and who knows what else. Finally I found myself at a fish packing plant, that was suspiciously full of dead raiders. Inside I found a cargo lift to the basement and I explored a bit, very sneakily. To my infinite horror I saw a patrol of Synths, so I bravely turned my tail and fled. But suddendly the ground floor was now also controlled by synths who weren't there before! I hid but was found out anyway by one. I beat it up and escaped. Then the front yard was also packed by these monstrous robots and I kept zig-zagging away while death rays just (mostly) flew by. That was panic-inducing indeed.
While I was working my way south I found a Museum of Witchcraft. I escaped that place pretty fast, too, after one very sudden and immediate death. Somehow I ended up into a village or town called Salem. There were a couple of Mirelurks, which I shotgunned out of the way pretty quickly. Then I chatted with the local lunatic who shortly informed that I was to start up some turrets and clear up the place. The multidozen-headed monster army slaughtered me time and time again and within seconds destroyed any turrets I managed to turn on.
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| Salem |
After running away from Salem's occupants I kept roaming the map clockwise however I dared. While avoiding a radio telescope station I heard some weird explosions and then I saw that someone was cultivating some nuclear mushrooms nearby. It made perfect sense to me to keep avoiding that place, too, and I somehow managed to keep away from the earshot of the angry raiders and their prey. Nearby I saw a friendly-looking chap in a Power Armor checking out a wrecked car. He was a member of some gang called the Atom Cats and he invited me over. This sounded like a great group to me!
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| Revere |
At this point I spent quite a few days in Sanctuary alone, tinkering with the settlement. My main goal was to build a house for myself, a house that the bothersome AI settlers couldn't enter at all to be on the way all the time. My first idea was to build an elevated house that you could enter only by jumping over a small gap on a bridge.
While leafing through the lists of different construction blocks I found a Concrete Foundation block which were handy, solid cubes. Out of those I built the walls of my non-subterranean basement. On top of that I laid the floorings and built a more public floor with a balcony (for shooting out of) and whatnot. The entrance to my house was on the second floor and the only way to get there was to jump from a bit too short ladder. Not a single NPC could get there with honest means.
I kept on this and some aimless wandering for a few weeks. A coworker of mine was really baffled when I told that I had finally found my way to the Diamond City - after many weeks of playing. For some wandering and exploring is more important than to some, what else could I say?
At some point I heard an emergency broadcast, that led me to the location of the last stand of a Brotherhood of Steel team, and I started solving this new mystery. In the end I solved it while roaming around, not really putting it to the top of my priority list. Stupidly I left reporting this mission to Danse way too late, my idea being that I'd just get a bunch of missions officially solved at the same time to minimize his bitching and whining.
Unlikely Valentine
Slowly I had got daring enough to sneak around the city a bit, so I was heading more or less eastwards from Diamond City. I was supposed to find a private detective Nick Valentine from some metro station, and he was for some reason supposed to be very important. Along my way I found a part of an awesome Gronak Barbarian outfit, from a comics store that was clearly
At long last, on a random evening I found the station and eventually the Vaul 114, full of gangsters. Knee-deep in blood and skull fragments I waded through and found Nick. As a surprise the guy wasn't a guy but a model 2 Synth. I didn't let that bother me but joined forces with him to shoot our way out. At the gate I knew to expect an ambush, so I prepared myself by grabbing my shotgun and handgrenades ready.
The gangster boss with his henchmen was waiting for me, but surprisingly he started talking instead of shooting. With my one point in Charisma it was pointless to say anything, so I practically told him to get bent and threw a 'nade into his gang's feet just as soon as the discussion ended. Only two characters survived my initial attack: the gangster and his lady friend (who immediately ran into me, but got a VATSful of shotgun shells into her face from no range at all). The lonely gangster being last one standing was then quickly defeated by the heroic duo.
Now that mr Valentine has joined me I decided to do another Main Quest task out of the way. We had to search for clues in Diamond City, but thanks to the annoying dog that took no time at all. Just like the trip from the city to the final target was pretty quick, despite a few natural events that occurred along the way (I met my first Yao Guai near a train control tower and jumped quite a bit).
Kelloggs all around the floor
Getting into Fort Hagen wasn't much of a challenge, I got in from the basement. There I just had to change my default armament, as the shotgun wasn't too effective against the synths. After a painfully slow fight inside I found the command center of the fort, which suspiciously had a Fat Man next to the door. Unusually I picked it up (and went over my carry weight limits once again, by a large margin) because I assumed the worst.Mr Kellogg, too, was more interested in shooting off his mouth instead of attacking me. Maybe someone better at speaking could've achieved something here, but not me. I attacked him as viciously as I ever could until he turned on a Stealth Boy and limped away. I didn't feel like shooting him from afar and being seriously overloaded I couldn't chase him to punch his head off, either, so I let him go a bit further away. I finished the fight swiftly by firing a mininuke to his whereabouts and enjoyed my XP.
To make my going easier I dropped the extra Fat Man immediately and filled my pockets with everything else that madfe sense, then left through the roof. I was pretty amazed, to say the least, when there was a Vertibird-launching and propaganda-broadcasting airship up on my sky. The Brotherhood of Steel was at it again, with their interesting toys. Of course I was tasked with reporting somewhere, being a BoS member, but I just couldn't give a damn about that at that point. Instead, I walked to the Minutemen to offer my briefly undivided attention and help.
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| ...whatthe... |
The minute men in their castle
For a few days I adventured around with Preston, doing all that he asked me to do. After saving a few settlements he told me that it'd be high time to recapture the old base of the Minutemen and to move there. Easy piece of pie, I thought, there couldn't be anything too bad on my way this early in the game.Yeah, right. First the fort's yard had to be cleared of Mirelurks. That was still easy and fun, as there were quite a few of us shooting around. After that we were to destroy all the 'lurk eggs in the nests and there were quite a load of them spread around the castle. When for the first time I killed the limit-exceeding egg (out of a couple of dozen attempts) and triggered the attack of the Mirelurk Queen. The Queen rose from the sea and proceeded to kill everyone pretty quickly. The reason was the ludicrously effective slime/poison/whatever that the monster spat around - along the small Mirelurks she spawned. That goo killed me in few seconds the first time around. Oh, and she also hit pretty hard if you went too close.
After many weird "I'll run away and... died, because the castle was half-packed with 'lurks too" attempts I was about to throw in the towel on this mission, too. Then I got the last-ditch idea of laying my frag mines along the Queen's approach route on the bank. This way I got it halfway killed, then I ran around, zigzaggin back and forth, peeking here and there, while shooting away with my highest RoF gun (my modified 10mm pistol, as I hadn't taken anything faster with me). At long last, after a bunch of deaths, I got lucky and dropped the mighty monster. I even could cook its meat on a campfire to make handy steaks that gave awesome bonuses!
This one (or maybe it was after another sidequest) rewarded me with a new special construction piece for my settlements: a cannon (imo more like a mortar (a type of a cannon, not the tiny grenade thrower)). Of course I built five in Castle so that I wouldn't run out of them. The indirect fire these babies delivered could be called anywhere in Boston, as far it was within range, just by lobbing a smoke bomb and waiting for the death to rain. Being a cheapskate I didn't use a single one of these, in case I'd run out of them when I needed them the most.
I had heard that this guns didn't have a mentionable range, so I guess it'd been wiser to build one here, another there and so on, so that I'd be generally within the range of at least a few of them instead of my current situation: it was either all of them or none at all. Well, maybe in a different playthrough - or while working my way through the DLC packs. Artillery is always awesome.
Unlocking the map
With the Castle unlocked and Minutemen happy I continued my aimless adventures. Mostly I just walked around and checked out whatever I encountered, mostly with a "I'll take a left there" approach and by following intriguing marks on my compass. Along the way I did find some cool junk, like a few abandoned, unpowered Power Armor and those started occupying a bit too much space around the Power Armor jack at Sanctuary...
Somehow I had thought that there weren't many Vaults around or in Boston. I had started from one and had found another one while following the storyline, I guessed maybe I'd find one more at some point. One day, while looking for something completely different, I noticed a gear on my compass, signifying a Vault. Of course I tried to enter. Despite me using all my charisma to sweet-talk myself inside, these clowns didn't open up their Vault door and demanded three Fusion Cores as an entrance fee! I decided that I'd run three of those almost empty (down to ~1% charge), even if it meant that I'd have to run circles in Power Armor to accomplish that. I would use all that power myself, as there was no way in the universe I was going to just give something that rare and valuable away.
Was the Vault's number 87? Could've been, but no matter, they were all too happy and feel-good, so I assumed I'd find a kiloton of skeletons from their closets. Yeah, in the end there was a mystery and a side quest to be done. Because as far as I could tell, I didn't get sick on the other side I gave the only cure to the disease to save the bothersome brat and I guess I got some nice guy points, if nothing else. In the hidden part I had talked the medical robot to join me, but I think I dumped the annoyingly French-accented CVRIE in one settlement or another and forgot it there. I had much better things to do.
Railroader's life
Someone had at some point told me to find the Railrod, the synth-helping hippie organization we first met in Fallout 3. These folks had to be first found, of course, and to achieve that only the starting point was hinted about. Luckily the route wasn't complicated at all, it just happened to go through a few Super Mutant -infested parts of the town. My assault shotgun, modified with love, helped with clearing the green mass away.
For some weird reason those do-good hippies took me at face value when I said that I was friendly and allowed me to join their ranks. They even let me straight into their super secret headquarters. Pfft.
It was clear as day that at some point I'd either sell them to the highest bidder, the one who first wanted their heads on a platter or just bomb them to obliteration just for the fun of it, if no one was interested in them. For the time being I decided that they'd be a way of gathering xp and potentially unlocking some faction-specific goods, if there was anything and if I could tolerate them that long. So I took care of some synth-saving quests, took sensor arrays to high places and supported some folks in their own missions.
The missions offered by a robot called PAM took me much further south than I had ever gone, so solving these quests took noticeably longer. Also, the further south you went the worse the enemies and surroundings became. All of this was mentioned in the loading screens, but it didn't require a degree in science to notice it in action...
When I was solving my first DIA Cache mission I was completely lost. First I murdered a buildingful of folks and then wondered why the quest indicator just kept me running around in circles. Then I started paying some more attention to it and followed it properly. All I had to actually do was to walk into a dead end in a corridor and it opened up a secret wall. Ka-ching, mission completed! So I had punched two dozen super mutants into a bloody pulp for nothing, but that was also fun and gave me handy loot.
I also cleared up a few places for new Safe Houses and whatever else I was asked to do. All these were surprisingly easy, so they didn't take up that much ammo and time. I was still pretty disappointed by the Railroaders and their apparent lack of appreciation of my services. Yes, they did thank me and praise me, but what do I do with that? I wanted new tools, toys, guns and ammo!
Every once in a while, when my pockets were overflowing, I popped by Sanctuary to tinker and fine-tune whatever I felt like. At this point I had found a handful of Bobbleheads and over a rackful of magazines. I collected them into my basement to be admired. After that I marched all my Power Armors onto the main floor, set them in a neat row and set up some lights around. For some reason I didn't really adjust Sanctuary itself mcuh, as I felt it was in a pretty good shape already.
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| A random NPC had spawned into my house. I pushed him down from the door and punched him in the face with my Power Fist. The corpse I left there to serve as a warning for the rest. |
Bossing
Danse had promised me a Power Armor of my own if I joined them. Despite his promises I hadn't got one immediately, so I went to ask, where my armor is and when was I going to get it? I also had a good handful of quests to drop, so I marched to the Cambridge Police HQ. Haylen was decently friendly, while Rhys... Well, he was on my long list, considering the future of the region.I was going to tell Danse about the missing patrol (see above), but because I hadn't completed that quest earlier (or completed the last phase after this quest) the mission got stuck into the "report to Paladin Danze" stage, because he had other things in his mind and didn't want to talk about this topic. Meh.
We took the Vertibird he had and headed towards the airship. Seeing Boston from the air was fun. It's a shame that there weren't many targets for the minigun mounted on the plane, but I kept firing just in case I got a lousy Raider in the sights.
On the airship, Prydwen, Danse told that he'd be my sponsor and I climbed the hierarchy up to the level of Knight. At long last I got my own BoS Power Amor that I parked in my house at Sanctuary. The local boss of the Botherhood was a bit of a bothersome complainer, just like his siblings in F3 and F:NV. Plenty of whining and hot air, little action. For some reason I found Fallout 2's BoS much more respectable than these human wastelands in Bethesda's games.
On one of Prydwen's decks I accidentally encountered the infamous Hitler Jugend I mean Brotherhood of Steel's own Volkssturm, uniformed child soldiers. I really, really wasn't expecting this. They even had their field caps and all.
Of course I had to finish a quest before I was accepted as a member of BoS. There was a place called Fort Strong right next to the airport and it was to be reconquered from the Supermutants. That didn't take long, as I was running around in my brand new Power Armor. Especially the yard was quickly cleaned as there was a teamful of us, each a heavily armored and armed psychopat.
The radiating heat of the south
After that mission I left the Brotherhood to wait for me to feel benevolent for them and proceeded southwards. The real reason for this was, of course, that I didn't want to progress with the main quest even accidentally, until I was ready for it.
Goodneighbor
Goodneighbour, a small town within the city, looked like a place that I'd have to wade through, ankle-deep in guts and brains. At least that's how the baldy who "welcomed" me there made me hope. But then the Ghoul-mayor, mr Hancock, arrived to the scene.
I was pretty busy at that point, so I just basically greeted the first five people and kept on adventuring. Later on I head that there were some quests available and a potential companion, too. Well, I had time to check those things later.
While roaming the wasteland I managed to find a village (or two) called Jamaica Plain, that was completely overrun by ferals. If I remember correctly, it could've been a BoS side quest that asked me to check that place out and as soon as I heard about a treasure, of course I had to stay to find it.
In the end I found the bunker shown in the picture below. While staring at the laser tripwires the first thought I had was "it's a good thing I don't have that damn braindead dog here with me". The mongrel was always the first one to run headlong into every mine, tripwire and trap that existed, as long as it was something that it wasn't supposed to touch... Anyway, the amount of tech scrap I got from dismantling those lasers was much more valuable than anything in the treasure chamber itself.
From Jamaica Plains I walked towards east again. After a few sidesteps I found the Poseidon Energy complex. Of course I had to visit there, just in case there was something neat.
Atomic kitties
After the Poseidon Energy visit I finally found my way to the Atom Cats Garage (and stole the Unarmed Bobblehead that was used as a hood ornament). The kitties were like the rockers from the '50s. These folks I definitely wanted to join, right away! Of course I had to show my value by solving a small quest. That meant that I had to walk to the next peninsula and fix something in the settlement.Then I returned to the garage to beg for acceptance, but I ended up defending the place. Gunners tried to push in with force, but got properly beaten up. As a thanks I was accepted in the gang and I even got my own Atom Cats leather jacked. Hah! Yes, it'd be cool to walk around wearing that, maybe armed with a Super Sledgehammer or a modified baseball bat.
Purposeful work
At this point I got it in my head that I wanted to get Nick Valentine to idolize me. I had lost count of how many "Nick loved that" and "Nick liked that" notes I had got while hacking, lockpicking or shooting off my mouth, but still he didn't like me enough. A coworker of mine hinted that I'd really want to go to the Salem's Museum of Witchcraft, for an egg. Peaceful solution to its quest would be something I'd want. Supposedly.I gathered an insane amount of purified water (cheap health drink) and randomized a hopefully good arsenal with me. Then I returned to the museum, walked around it to the cellar door and climbed to the main floor. I knew now what to expect and lobbed a handful of Molotovs, hand grenades and prepared to punch the shit out of this legendary whoknowswhat-Deatchclaw with my brand new Furious Puncturing Power Fist (which did an increasing amount of damage on each consecutive hit on the same target). After a bit of panic-stricken clicking and button-mashing the monster was beaten and I barely alive. But that was just enough, wasn't it?
From a corner I found an intact Deathclaw egg that was apparently to be taken to a valley I had briefly passed by much, much earlier. There was a scary-looking monster, whom I could try to talk soothingly. I left the egg and ran away. Nick, for some damn weird reason, did like my choice.
Along my way I did as usual, checked on whatever looked interesting. The nest of the Forged at a foundry was indeed an interesting place. Luckily I had been carrying a Lucky Synth Chest piece as an armor part of mine, because it made me (or my torso) immune to catching fire... Finally I found myself in a melting chamber of sorts, observing some kind of a membership ritual.
This random dude had to either kill an innocent civilian or die himself. For some reason I was mixed into this show (they hadn't heard me killing everyone else in the gang so far, I guessed) and I was told to show how it's done, or to kill the gutless kid. I weighed my two apparent options just as long as it took me to notice a third guy, a Forged member, standing nearby. Immediately I punched VATS on and punched his head into tiny gory bits, getting the rest of the gang mad at me. Excluding the boss they were of no real mentionable danger, but even Slag with his soft head obeyed my modified Power Fist in the end.
During my random trips around the yet unchecked areas I encountered two crashed Vertibirds (one in the pic below, another in the puddles of far south, near the Murkwater construction site and a yet another Mirelurk Queen, westwards from them). Next to the both of them was a lonely, rusting X-01 or rather, following the Fallout 2 naming, Advanced Power Amor! Both were missing pieces, but I was damn excited when I found something that I hadn't even dreamed of seeing in the game.
Sometimes I got to take handy shortcuts by using the raised motorways, whenever I actually could climb up to them. At the end of one of them I found entrances to a couple of buildings. One of them had a sick amount of robots and turrets that made sure that I couldn't get through alive at this point. After a few attempts and reloadings and glancing around for alternative routes I noticed, that "hey, maybe I could jump on that roof and stay alive..."
My idea was otherwise very good, but on that roof I got assaulted by my first Deathclaw Matriarch. Still, it was an easier adversary than those robots, which was somewhat surprising.
At an outdoors theatre I met a suspiciously acting cult, or whatever you'd call them. Their leader clearly had no eye for anything, as he started threatening a guy as prepared for war as I was. Well, after that little encounter they weren't posing a problem to anyone else, either.
Following some random quest I found myself playing detective in Diamond City. The local Mengele had gone mad(der) and had cocked up an operation of his. I did try to talk my way through, but I still had that one lonely point in Charisma and that wasn't going to convince anyone of anything. In the end he shot himself, I couldn't help it.
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| Yay, my Charisma climbed up to two ... |
Outside the map itself
While I was wandering in the north and northwest, I couldn't walk out of the map even accidentally. On the contrary, the invisible wall blocked me sometimes in idiotic place. But then, around halfway down along the western edge I could actually walk outside (if you looked at the pipboy map, that is) and I found some buildings. I thought that this was just for some DLC entrance points later on, or something.I was pretty surprised when a few half-dead Deathclaws ran out from a shack. Inside I encountered my second Behemoth-sized Super mutant (that I nibbled to death when I found handy hideout inside the building). Of course I beat the other monsters to death, I really couldn't leave them roaming around freely.
Surfing the non-existing waves of the Glowing Sea
Soon I found myself from the edge of something that looked even worse than anything I had encountered so far. Correctly I guessed that this was going to be radiating pretty heavily, so I ate a couple of RadXs and started running madly. I managed to unlock a couple of map locations before I had to concede and run back to the relative safety in the north. If I managed to find a radiation suit or something, I could've returned...The area was more or less constantly beaten by an radiation storm. Wandering around was like taking a picnic in Mordor. Much later I learned that this was the infamous "Glowing sea" that had been talked about here and there, including a loading screen text.
Back east again
Near the east edge I found a strange quarry. If I recall correctly, I found a really weird unique knife of a cult of some sort. But by that point I had found my absolute favourite melee weapon: the Ripper. Of course I had immediately modified it to have the extended blade that caused bleeding damage (in other words: your enemy starts slowly bleeding to death, whenever you've scored a bleeding hit). That was just about the best weapon against humanoids, animals and Mirelurks. Only against Synths and robots it was much less awesome. The biggest of monsters were semi-easily dispatched by keeping the Ripper running while you ran and jumped around them.
From a misty island (or peninsula?) I found another Mirelurk Queen, that was quickly Rippered to death without any issues. The key to my success was the clump of trees you can see in the pic, they kept the megalobster in check and myself in almost perfect safety.
After proving the insane awesomeness and power of the Extended Ripper I dared to return to Salem at long last. Now cutting the local 'lurks was child's play. After the last one was torn to shreds I went and turned on the four untouched turret stations and collected my reward from the lunatic. Revenge had been sweet.
A literal rocket ship
Quite a few weeks after my first run-by I found myself near the sailship that had somehow ended on an building. This time they didn't fire at me but asked me to enter instead. The boat was full of robots, their captain being quite peculiar. Again I completed a handful of miscellaneous side quests for them and in the end I was rewarded with the Broadsider, a portable naval gun. By the way, I didn't even try it out, because I had so few cannon balls and that thing weighed like nothing else...It's a shame I didn't find a way to climb aboard while the ship flew. Much later I found the skyscraper where it smashed into. Sadly I couldn't use their guns to clean up the neighboring streets anymore.
Helping Nick
I had got tired of serial solving unimportant autogenerated quest and decided to complete a mission or two from the main line. Just as soon as I had gone through Kellogg's memories Nick opened up and asked me to help with his past. At last!
Finding the arch nemesis of the original Nick Valentine was pretty easy. Or I was too beefed up complared to what was expected, but what could I have done as he didn't talk to me before? When we finally met the nemesis, I shot off my mouth again and when the fight began I didn't get to do anything, as Nick had already dived up to the guy and was badly blocking my punching lines.
As soon as we left the chamber the game told me that Nick idolized me and I got some sort of a temporary perk whenever I was adventuring with him. That made me think if all the other NPC companions had their own specific missions and how much work would it take to unlock them all...
Again at a random point I remembered that there was that one top-level lock in Vault 111 that I now possessed the skills to open. I think I tried that gun once, 'cause that bugger also utilized Fusion Cores that I was paranoidly hoarding (I had about seventy).
The Bobblehead rush
Now I began going through the map systematically. I think I spent a couple of weeks running around the map, searching for unvisited locations. While doing that I found some sick nests of enemies (Gunner Plaza was challenging, for example) and eventually each of the missing Bobbleheads.
Well, that was it, the stand got filled up. I also collected the magazines at a nice rate, when I took the screenshot the fourth magazine stand was about 25% full.
A perfect Enclave Power Armor
On the top of a skyscraper I found a third Advanced Power Amor, it was "only" a Mk III, but complete. I rushed with that back to Sanctuary and modified it up to the sixth level, painted it looking mean and modded however I felt appropriate.On one of the arms I put rusty knuckles to provide some bleeding damage, on the other I added some Tesla coils for electric damage. On the left leg I wanted servos (I'd regenerate APs faster while moving), on the right one explosive vents (when falling amidst my enemies in the Marvel pose the explosion damage would spread out further). Then on the helmet I installed a sensor pack (Per++) and a tactical flashlight. And I really could not avoid installing a jetpack into the torso.
Of course I parked this piece of equipment next to the others and ignored it until the very end of the game. Why? Because it consumed Fusion Cores (in my opinion always too fast) and I might need them.
Oh, what's that? A unique version of the Super Sledgehammer? Yes please! I didn't use that toy as much as I wanted, because it weighed annoyingly much for that phase in the game. I was going to take it into active duty at a less critical phase, but now I had got all the non-autogenerated quests completed, except all but Nick's assumed personal quests and the next one in the main questline.
Towards the finish line
I didn't expect that I could choose who to cooperate with to get into the infamous Institute. My BoS symphaties were still in the negative zone and I had most of my junk in Sanctuary, so I headed to meet Sturges. There was still a vacant lot next to the house I had built for my settlers (next to the roundabout-like thing), which I chose for the mission-required setup.So, I had to built a Teleport base, a Tower thingie, a wonder Antenna and a Control table. These monsters also ate power as if there was no tomorrow, so I was going to have to build a handful of generators as well. This gave me a great idea: if I only need to use this teleporter only occasionally, I could build a switch between it and the gennies. This way I could also connect my new power bank into the power grid in Sanctuary and disconnect it from the teleporting subgrid with a flick of a switch (or two). This way I wouldn't lose the output when it wasn't necessary.
For the Institute
Inside the Institute the story took its own turns. I did some random jobs for the boss, "Father" pretty gladly. Amazingly quickly I got to the point where when beginning a quest I got a notification saying "if you proceed, the BoS will get permanently pissed off at you". Before doing anything else I saved my game as a base and deleted the old ones. From here on I would deviate to check any other options, as soon I was completely done with this line.
Among other things I got to make a wonderful world conquering speech, work with a Tokamak-like fusion reactor and solve internal crises. I was also elected as the next boss of the Institute, but somehow I thought that I wasn't going to be doing anything for real, so it was a bit of a silly plot twist.
Oh and the hippies, their fate was just what I had desired. Father asked me to remove a thorn from our side, also known as pasting the Railroad's leadership on their walls. With the greatest of enthusiasm I left to take care of my assignment. Rather surprisingly a couple of grenades and molotovs thrown from the entrance corridor to the cavern tore a good bunch of those clowns, so that there weren't more than a couple of jerks to be beaten to pulp. They had not been the lucky ones, standing further away from the blasts.
Finally I was sent to take care of the Brotherhood. First I had to punch my way into the airport and when inside, to destroy three shield generators. Each destroyed shield allowed more Synths to be teleported in to spread the destruction. Then I was supposed to protect a special Synth, who was updating the Liberty Prime (that had appeared from nowhere) to a version that recognized all the BoS members as dirty commies. That was beautiful.
I was already completely certain that this was going to be my goto-point after I had seen all the alternative endings. After the summary I saved and returned to my root savepoin
Brotherhood of Steel
My second questline was going to be BoS and I noticed that I'd be going through many of the same places but with just different enemies. In this line of quests I had to first get Liberty Prime built and then functional. There was a side quest that I had done in the wrong time and one of the main quests failed because of that, but at least there was a plan B to circumvent the issue.After a bunch of missions Liberty Prime marched from the airport to the CIT front yard to raise a hell, just like when it went to Project Purity in Fallout 3. This time it dug a hole to the ground with its eye laser and I used that to enter the labyrinths of the institute. Occasionally this part reminded me of Portal, most likely because of the old and abandoned places.
Once again the BoS's assholiness was clearly noticeable, as the final goal of the last mission was to blow up the Institute's reactor (funny that this one wasn't to be saved and cherished like all the other remaining pieces of advanced technology). The screenshot below tells it all: you could observe the formation of the all-cleansing mushroom cloud from the top of a tower, while half a city was covered with the immediate explosion and the rest subjected to fallout. Hypocritical assholes, that's what I say.
Just in case I was curious enough to see the DLC packs from their point of view, I saved the game. I sincerely doubted that I would want to, though.
Railroad
Apparently there were just three main varieties of the ending. The last one I checked was for the whiny humanists. Now for my greater amusement I took out my Advanced Power Armor that I painted pink, just because. Then I grabbed a inventoryful of heavy weapons, such as the minigun, because I knew I didn't intend to or need to save up ammo anymore.
We can ignore the details as in the end I was sent to the Georgetown Police HQ, where I had originally saved Paladin Danse and his useless henchmen. Now the Railroad chiefs had decided that the Synth-hating Brotherhood of Steel was to be driven away from this neighborhood once and for all. The Georgetown hideout was to be cleansed from the undesireds and a Vertibird that was standing on the helipad was to be socialised for an operation.
Cleaning up the Prydwen was extremely amusing in the Power Armor (especially with the fourth level Pain Train, I dashed into folks, jumped into them and empited my Fat Boy in the dormitory). All the whiny jerks and generally annoying bastards got what was coming to them and fast. For a while I was baffled why a couple of red enemy markers were just bouncing back and forth on my compass and refused to die under a barrage of Mini Nukes. When I finally got tired of that and ran to punch their heads off myself I noticed that hah, they were the child soldiers. And children were immortal. Graaah.
I assumed that the game couldn't expect me to kill immortal characters and that the named ones (and everyone else) were enough. I set up the explosives I was sent to set, marched back to the flight deck and flew to safety. Yes, it looked like it was enough.
After the Brotherhood was slaughtered to the last man, woman and child in a flaming hell I was sent to blow up the Institute's reactor. I'm going to save you, poor reader[s] and skip the second very similar ending. Finally I saved my game for potential but unlikely future use and played some other games for a few months.
I was going to take on the robot-themed DLC pack from the canon ending I had chosen, whenever I felt like playing Fallout 4 again (while I'm writing this it's been out for weeks and the second pack was released maybe yesterday). If someone thinks I played slow, I'm going to mention a friend of mine who started playing as soon as the game was out and still hadn't progressed the main quest beyond killing Kellogg. Because "I'm just adventuring around!"
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