Journal entry 4: The Vault Hunter's Guide to the Galaxy

We're going to start today with a regular feature which I like to call "What the fuck, VATS?"

I don't think even Dirty Harry could blow a guy's head off like that.

Continuing on this Wasteland Survival guide thing, I wandered through a few towns, shot some more animals, generally took in the scenery.  I levelled a lot faster than usual too.  Seriously, I'm like level 6 or something.

I decided to be a good consumer and take in the ads around the local area.

These ads were put up before the big one hit.  Vault-tec, at least, was prepped for a bomb to drop so I guess they knew something was likely to happen soon (I haven't read up on all the lore and don't intend to, I fully realise there may have been a cold war raging for months prior to this).  That in mind, it seems a bit deranged to advertise things like Nuka Cola and Sugar Bombs.  If I'm fearing for my family's safety in the face of an impending nuclear fireball, I'm not going to want to buy nuke themed products.

Also, look at this kid.  He looks both surprised and slightly nauseated.  If the kid on the box isn't enjoying the product, there'd better be one Hell of a toy surprise inside.

This lady's face amuses me.  Just wanted to share that.

I'd been sent to go look into that factory which could fulfil my new personal goal of replacing everyone in the wasteland with robots.  Except that wouldn't be very polite, so I suppose it'd have to be a goal of creating many robots workers to help people in their everyday lives, plus a couple of hundred to help me shoot dogs and flies.  Onward then, into the robotorium!

I briefly thought this guy might have been Mr. Handshake.  I don't want him to shake anything of mine, let alone my hand.  Thankfully all the robots in here were turned off and happy for me to take all of their energy cells.  It's a good thing that the lasers built into robots run on the same cells as the lasers I carry.  I'd hate it to be like when the remote stops working, you only have AA batteries but the remote only takes these weird tiny round things with Chinese writing on them.

Robot weapons don't appear to degrade.  I'm hoping at some point there's an option to cut a robot hand off, wear it over my own as a glove and run around firing infinite lasers.

I've sworn allegiance to the 'bots already but I took it steady through here.  You never know if a robot has been programmed to kill humans or just "all the humans who aren't this one guy".  I didn't want to take my chances.

The raiders don't seem to have a sense of humour and I doubt they'd bother to haul a protectron all the way to the bathroom, so I suppose this guy just shut down and fell over while he was stood in front of the toilet.  Maybe it wanted to be human like that robot in Bicentennial Man.  Now there was a good movie.

The mole rats look a little too much like the Bad Moon that the night goblins worship in Warhammer Fantasy Battles.  I'm really concerned about that.

Also, fucking VATS etc, etc...

YEAH!  Not so hot on your own, chucklenuts!  Get shrek't!

What in Yoruk's name is that?!
God, the only thing these things want to do is lick me and spit at me.  I have a real problem with saliva.  Makes me feel sick as a dog.  I get a bit squicked out by body horror, too.  If I actually saw one of these things in real life, it'd be a God damned nightmare incarnate.

Have at thee, knave!  Rest assured that thine assault rifle will prove most useful to the noble cause of reclaiming these colonial lands in the name of fair Britannia once again!

I realise that killing one guy doesn't make me any kind of badass but this felt pretty great.

These guys are lovely!  I wander into their territory, they help me to kill centaurs and super mutants and then they tell me to go about my business and don't talk to me, don't give me quests, don't require payment, don't follow me, don't shoot me and don't seem to want to interact in any way!

This is exactly what I'm looking for in a faction.  Someone who'll solve all my problems and then leave me alone while they look for more of my problems to sort out.

Brotherhood of Steel, you guys are okay in my book.

Hmm.  A booth to defend yourself from radiation.  That he took a book with him but didn't take any food or water suggests that he didn't think radiation poisoning would be a problem if he just waiting a couple of hours.

I realised here that I could read a copy of the same book multiple times but get a stat boost from each one.  Odd, that.  I can't read the same literal book, Vaulter seems to eat them once he's read them but having read at least 3 copies of Lying: Congressional Style, I don't know what he's up to.  Maybe he only reads a chapter, gets bored and then eats them.  Dragonbjorn couldn't read the same book more than once.

I'm glad I took the "double stats from books" perk now.

Looking at the library from this angle, it actually looks almost normal.

This lady was nice.  Brotherhood of Steel again.  Asked me what the hell I was doing on her territory (sensible) and then respected my request to explore the library and told me to bring her books for cash.  This is even better than a quest.  This is a person who takes vendor trash and buys it for huge amounts.  Wikis like to call these repeatable quests, but quests give you experience sometimes and require you to do or fine multiple things.  This isn't a quest.  If bringing things to people like this is a quest, I'm just about to go for a quest to Sainsbury's to recover the ancient bagged tea of legend and the 6 pack of soaps plundered from the Leather stronghold of the Imperium.

Why is that company called Imperial Leather, anyway?  Did they misspell lather?

"Warning: 201 years overdue!"

For what?  I logged into this terminal as a librarian.  I suppose librarians aren't exempt from late fees but I'd like to know what I need to return.  Maybe it'd be like the Scott Pilgrim game where if you clear his balance at No Account Video, it turns into the best shop in the game.  Maybe I could buy and eat stat books.  I'd be down with that.

Brotherhood of Steel Paladin?  I'm less in favour of your organisation here.  That's a bit pompous.  If I run into a Templar, Knight or Inquisitor, I'm going to go right off this faction and probably get all pissy and start suggesting that they're future elves.  Looking back at my old posts, I seem to accuse anything I dislike of being an elf, being built by an elf or being a loosely connect elf by product.

I hope you guys are okay with that because I really don't intend to stop doing it.  I'm mature enough to realise I'm being petty and immature but not to stop doing it.

Shot off another raider head.  It broke off cleanly and span through the air sever feet.  I shot this guy with the second smallest possible potato gun of a pistol.

VATS!

Hockey masks give you +5 to unarmed.  I found that really charming.  I do love me a bit of horror.  It's my second favourite genre, right above comedy and right below David Lynch style chaotic mindfuck.

Go watch Eraserhead.  It's on youtube.  It'll change your life like it changed mine and you'll thank me for it.

I'm okay with the raiders taking prisoners but they don't look like the building type and these cages wouldn't probably fit through the doors to get in here so I'm left to believe that the library stored little torture cages in the children's section.

That actually makes me shiver a bit.

Sir Vaulter decided to chill in the death room for a while.  Nobody relaxes like the Sir.

While my actions might not reflect it, I'm now the most intelligent person to ever grace the surface of the Earth.  Intelligence has very little short term practical application but I sure am getting a lot of skill points which is pretty cool.  My long term plan is to get nerd rage to up my carrying capacity and then max out science, lockpicking, speech, small guns, maybe energy weapons.  Melee and barter can wait.  I don't trust myself with explosives.

Admin: FUCK YOU.  Usergroup: FUCK YOU
Raiders don't look like hackers either so... maybe some teenagers got into the system?

I wandered around the upper floor of the library looking for a way to download the archives.  I'm really enjoying the way this quest is laid out.  Either phone it in by completing the very easy immediate objective, lie about doing it or do the hard objective and get some more stuff.  I like optional quest elements, I feel like it gives you a real sense of reward for doing a good job rather than a "just enough" job.

As I wandered, I tripped a land mine.  Well, this place was under siege and mines are easy to carry, but quite why the only things being mines were some filing cabinets is anybody's guess.  I also liked the way that I had two ways to deal with this area, either destroy the gun turrets or hack the terminals and turn them off.  Shame that I needed science 50 to do the hacking, that seems very high for a newbie quest, but I had enough so I was fine.  Likewise for lockpicking, a normal lock requires skill 50.  You need to be half as good as an absolute master locksmith to open a "normal" lock.  If I was half as good as the best safecracker in the world, I'd expect to be a pretty significantly skilled guy.

On the top floor I found a way to turn a turret on.  This seemed silly but suspicious so I declined, walked around a corner and got shot in the face by a raider with a rocket launcher.  Problematic.  On a reload, I turned the turret on, ran away from it, lead the raiders out and dealt with the problem.  Again, unlike Skyrim, I really feel like I'm being rewarded for dealing with conflict in a non-standard way and while it was a pretty obvious setup to a puzzle, I really appreciated it.  It's very refreshing!

You don't want to hold on to the mini nuke because it makes you nervous?  You know exactly what atrocities I've been indulging in because YOU have asked me to perform them in the name of science!  Christ lady, I'm definitely the very last person you give enormous explosives to!  Have you seen what it's like outside?  That's because people like me had very big weapons!  This is how accidents happen!

I've got a few mini nukes now.  I'm not sure what to do with them yet.  I'm sure as hell not going to toss them like grenades.  Maybe I can load them in the rock-it launcher but that seems like a bad idea, somehow.  Putting high explosives into a souped-up leaf blowers is how you get to spend the rest of your life working in advertising for personal injury lawyers.  Or as a corpse.  Lord knows I'm good at being a corpse.

I finished the survival guide.  Moira thought I was super intelligent and wasn't afraid to tell me so, so she's been elevated from "quest giver" to "friend".  And quest giver is a pretty lofty social goal to start with, I'll have you know.  I love people who have quests that don't involve the stones of Barenziah.  I was given a book, a perk that makes me soak more damage and +6 to a couple of skills.

Now I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I was hoping for more than +6 to two skills.  I realise that she gave me a lot of cool stuff along the way but this quest took like 5 hours.  It was longer than the entire storyline quest of some games.  It does feel like a bit of a pat on the head, but stats is stats.

Oddly, even though the Wasteland Survival Guide is a very informative book, Vaulter is unwilling to read and eat it.  Maybe because he can't learn anything from a book he wrote himself.  I sold it back to Moira because it's okay to sell presents back to people who gave them to you if you don't want them.  Some people would call that rude, but at charisma 7, I think you'll find it's just refreshingly up front or at best, charmingly eccentric.

Thought for the day
For an irradiated, monster haunted, bandit strewn hellhole with no farms and water that's only considered clean once it's been heavily treated, there sure are a lot of healthy people wandering around.