Fallout 4 gets me through the holidays

I have been playing Fallout 4 for several months now. The holidays are very stressful for me, so I decided to pick up some creation club add-ons to spice things up.

My last play thru, I sided with The Minutemen against the Institute, took on The Brotherhood of Steel, and freed the traders in Nukaworld. Minutemen vs. The Brotherhood is a spectacular way to finish the main quest line. Also, removing the slave collars from the traders caused everyone’s outfits to glitch, turning Nukaworld Bazaar into a nudist colony. Enjoy your freedom you kinky bastards!

This time thru I sided with The Railroad. The quest line is ok, if a bit stressful. There were moments where I thought I had accidentally backed The Institute.

I also picked up the sentinel power armor addon, the settlement ambush kit, and some of the free armor and weapon skins. I normally don’t go for DLC, but it was a little Christmas present to myself. Skinning armor is nice because it unifies the paint scheme for disparate pieces of armor, which makes your outfit look nice even though the pieces are mismatched. Surprisingly, it’s not that big of a deal for my player character, but it’s nice when outfitting settlers and provisioners. Putting Minutemen or Railroad logos on mismatched armor helps me to not accidentally shoot friendlies during raids. Seeing an armed person walking down the road in Minuteman armor is nice from a role-play standpoint. Like order is being restored to The Commonwealth.

The Sentinel Power Armor

The Sentinel armor is interesting in that it effectively adds a second companion. Much like how Skyrim let you have both a dog and a human companion, this lets your “pet” be a full suit of power armor. You can equip it like a companion, and it’s default weapon is full auto laser rifle. Probably the best feature is the personality mode, which lets you choose between the Protectron, Assaultron, or my personal favorite: Mister Gutsy. My nickname for him is “War Machine.”

Having a companion with you long term can get annoying when you hear them say the same things over and over, especially Preston’s judgmental ass criticizing me for picking up scrap. You know that sniper scope on that bad ass rifle you carrying? I made it with junk I be scavenging. I put this shit to good use, Pres, so shut up. The Mister Gutsy personality option doesn’t talk much, it just mostly accuses all hostiles of being Communists. It’s pretty awesome, except when I am trying to creep up on a target to back stab it and he suddenly yells “IS THAT SOMEONE THAT NEEDS ME TO KICK THEIR ASS!?!?!”

You can load the sentinel up with gear too, but once it’s been outfitted with a full set of power armor, his carry capacity isn’t great, and it’s a pain accessing the menu for it, so I just use it in extreme emergencies. Also, the sentry armor doesn’t get damaged the way that wearing power armor can, so there is way less to maintain. Putting a companion in power armor sounds good in theory, but they get shot up and you end up repairing their shit all the time. I am not sure if the quality of the armor matters for the sentinel, so I just throw basic armor with Minuteman or Railroad paint on War Machine and roll out.

My current play thru is on “Very Hard” mode, which means that a lot of enemies could one-shot me at the lower levels. Having a War Machine with me is nice because he rushes in to the fight and draws out enemies so I can snipe them from a covered position. He repairs himself, but not very quickly, so it’s possible for him to get shutdown, and you have to physically access his console to jump start the repair process. This is different than having a robot companion that you can use a repair kit on. It’s not as fast as using a repair kit, but it doesn’t take any materials. Once you get used to his cover fire, you can notice real quick when he and the companion are down, because suddenly everything is shooting at you.

Automatron

Speaking of robot companions. I think that my favorite expansion is Automatron. I am a sucker for pet robots, and building a robot to protect a settlement is one of my favorite things to do in the game. I especially love the Mister Handy torso, and using it to make my own varieties of Mister Handy, like one with giant caliper hands and pincer legs that I call “Mister Pinchy”, or one with giant saw blades for hands and buzz saw legs that I call “Mister Slicey”. Other models include “Mister Shooty” who has minigun arms, and “Mister Tradey” who has all of the storage mods, and works as a Provisioner.

I also built a Sentry Bot for The Castle that I named “Sarge” after the malfunctioning robot in The Castle basement. I wish you could repair him specifically so that he could have a real personality. But he looks pretty cool rolling around The Castle keeping his big red eye on things. The other thing that would be great is to put faction paint on robots. Mister Shooty would look pretty awesome with a Minuteman paint job.

Once you have done the Mechanist quest line, you end up with Jezebel as a kind of settler. She refuses to interact positively with you, so while you can assign her to jobs at a settlement, and she will do them, she makes a lousy shop keeper because you can’t buy or sell anything. She just complains about you. I just put her to work at Graygarden as either a farmer or security. I would send more robots to live and work at Graygarden, but I think that having a bunch of companions at one settlement is a waste. I like to send Codsworth to live there, until Ada shows up, then I send him off to another settlement. I guess I could return him to Sanctuary and send Preston to The Castle, but I kind of like having Preston at Sanctuary for some reason.

I don’t know if having multiple companions at a settlement affects how many settlers that you can attract, but I like to wait until a settlement is maxed out population-wise before I add robots. Companions seem to make better security personnel than regular settlers, so that is the job I usually give them. Good security becomes a major deal when you start provoking raids with the Settlement Ambush Kit.

Settlement Ambush Kit

The settlement ambush kit adds a couple of cool things. You can add walls and a special guard tower to your settlement, which makes defending it a lot simpler because your guards stay in one place, rather than roaming around. You can also add remote view video cameras that let you kind of fast travel from one site to another without actually leaving. A funny glitch with the sentinel armor is that it will physically go to the site you are viewing, so switching camera views makes War Machine run all over the place to stand in front of your camera.

A really cool feature of the kit is the ability to send out fake distress signals that trigger raids. So far I have only fired it up once, but it just sends wave after wave of raiders to your settlement, and it keeps score of how many waves you have survived. I am assuming there is one for ferals as well, but I haven’t tried it yet. I re-rolled my character not long after getting it and right now my settlements are ill-equipped for a massive raid.

The Tipping Point

Now that I have done two full re-rolls, I can say with relative confidence that the game balance shifts when your character level hits the mid 40’s. If you have been doing settlement building and Minutemen quests consistently, they should be producing caps, food, and salvage to the point that you are crafting most of the things you need (oil, adhesive, stimpaks) and mostly buying ammo, aluminum, and steel. My first play-though went over 100th level, and the game was fairly easy to play at that point. I had settlements that had nuclear reactors, multiple industrial water purifiers, and laser turrets protecting everything. The main story line can put you in front of Kellogg pretty quickly, and he can be really tough to beat at low levels. Having multiple combat perks combined with high end weapons and armor make a big difference.

I think a challenging play through would be to use no companions or Sentinels, and to skip the Minutemen all together. You will still end up with settlements, but you probably wouldn’t have nearly as many. I might try that when I re-roll again, supporting either the Institute or the Brotherhood of Steel. I think that both of those factions also want some form of settlement, so you may end up with them anyway.

Being Addicted to Fallout 4

In the past, I have written about playing video games to cope with depression. It’s that time of year again, so I am playing games a lot. I basically love 4 kinds of games:

1. Open world RPGs with various factions, families, and morality systems (like Skyrim or Fable)
2. First-Person Shooters with engaging single player stories (like Half-Life)
3. Farm management games with community, friendship, and/or romance dynamics (like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley)
4. Tower Defense games where you manage funds/materials/etc to build steadily stronger fortresses
5. Pretty much anything where you have robot minions

Fallout 4 is basically a turducken of these various game elements. It’s pretty much the most addictive thing I have ever encountered. Imagine a dish made by the guys from Epic Meal Time, using only ingredients provided by the guys from Breaking Bad. Fallout 4 is basically things I like about Skyrim, dialed up to 11.

I picked up the full Fallout 4 suite on a ridiculous Steam sale a few months ago, and I have spent pretty much all of my non-sleeping, non-working, and non-child-rearing hours playing it. I know the game is like 5 years old. My gaming hardware is also 5 years old. Fight me.

In Skyrim, I loved helping kids and dogs. I basically forgot about the dragons and focused on amassing gold in order to build a house for everyone. Then it turned out that Lucia is afraid of the swamp where I built the house, so I had to win a civil war for her so we can live in peace and safety in Windhelm.

Well, in Fallout 4, not only are you searching for your lost son, you meet Dogmeat within the first 10 minutes and he’s way more bad ass than Meeko. I did a ton of work to ensure that Dogmeat was safe at Sanctuary Hills, under the watchful eyes of Codsworth, while I searched for Shaun.

Another thing I loved about Skyrim was meeting, marrying, and traveling with Mjoll the Lioness. She was a total bad ass, and so she and her dude Aerin come to live with me, the kids, the dog, and the House Carl in some kind of weird Nordic polyamory version of The Brady Bunch.

Well, in Fallout 4, I was able to seduce Preston. We took on the raiders, ferals, and supermutants of the commonwealth while building settlements together. *Then* I was also able to seduce Piper, Curie, and Hancock. I was like some kind of post-nuke/pan-sexual version of Captain Kirk, getting in fights with and/or boning robots and shit. Again, taking something I liked from Skyrim and turning the volume up to 11.

As much as the memes liked to dunk on Preston for never shutting up about helping settlements, settlements fucking rule. Which is the other way that Fallout 4 got me: Building. Fucking. Farms. I set up a bunch of settlements, planted crops to feed the settlers, and built shacks and shit for them to live in. Oh, and I surrounded them with automated turrets. There’s nothing greater than hearing on the radio that a settlement needs help, just to fast travel there and watch the attackers get shredded by my sentries.

Life in The Commonwealth is much easier when you have large supplies of ammunition and caps. A holdover from my Skyrim days is my tendency to sneak about, shooting targets from a distance. My survivor is a decent sniper, but he really only gets to clip a couple of targets at proper sniper range. After that, he has to creep up a bit closer. At sniper range, I like to use a .50 cal hunting rifle. While closing the gap I like to use a custom .308 combat rifle that I call “Quickshot.” It’s great for putting things down with two or three rounds, and it’s silenced. If I have time to line up a headshot, like in VATS, I can put most things down with one round. The problem is that .50 and .308 ammo is kind of rare so I am constantly purchasing it. One way to make lots of caps and to buy ammo at a discount is to set up vendors at the various settlements. I put up a weapons stand and I can usually buy 50-100 rounds of .308 every couple of days. Every time I come to a settlement to drop off salvage, I hit up the emporium for .308, .50 cal, and shotgun shells.

I tend to hoard .45 and 5.56mm to hand out to settlers that work security. I build out combat rifles and assault rifles for the provisioners and settlers assigned to guard posts and to scavenging stations. These dudes get my hand-me-down weapons and armor, as well as stuff I’ve looted off of Raiders. When a settlement gets attacked all of the settlers will run to fight, so it doesn’t hurt to outfit even the farmers with armor and upgraded weapons. When you are 80th level or so, your settlements can have like 20 people in them, so that’s a lot of gear to be handing out. There are like 20 settlements in the Commonwealth proper, plus the ones for Far Harbor and Nukaworld, which means that the endgame for me is all about dealing arms to your peasant militia.

Another luxury item to have is large amounts of salvage. Most vendors will let you buy large shipments of salvage for a thousand or more caps. When you are maxing out the defenses of a settlement, or building lots of robots, you tend to run low on aluminum, steel, and oil. One way I get steady access to lots salvage is to set up trading emporium at my settlements as well. This lets me buy salvage in bulk. One particular item that you need tons of is adhesive. You can craft vegetable starch at a cooking station by combining corn, mutfruit, and tatoes. So putting folks to work farming these items at your settlements is important. Once you have a large supply of vegetable starch, you can sell off the excess that appears in your workshops. Once your local traders are out of caps, you can go to the Diamond City Market to unload the rest. If you set up a clinic, you can also buy bloodpacks which you will need to make stimpaks. Depending on your selection of perks, you can keep your survivor going on just stimpaks.

The other advantage of numerous settlements is provisioners. With the Local Leader perk, you can add a settler to a trade route. This lets you share the salvage that you have with all of your trading settlements. Provisioners will then walk the roads between their trading settlements on a regular basis. Obviously, this is very handy for building out new settlement, or for getting supplies to smaller settlements, but there are two other advantages:

1. If you find a provisioner out in the wild, you can dump any excess items or salvage on them, and the items will eventually find their way to a settlement workshop.
2. If you arm and armor a provisioner, he or she will engage the random spawns that happen out on the road, making The Commonwealth a tiny bit safer for you and your other settlements. I tend to use Sanctuary Hills and The Castle as my main trading hubs. It’s funny when a random attack happens on one of these places when there are half a dozen traders standing around. It’s like having extra security. Building custom arms and armor for provisioners and settlement security is a good way to safely earn XP as well. If you combine building settlement stuff with crafting while abusing the “well rested” perk, you can level yourself a bit without getting killed constantly.

The morality system is fairly strict as well. I have rolled back a game more than once because I chose poorly at a critical juncture. I will go back through and play the other way, as a bad guy or whatever, at some point. I must have played through Skyrim a dozen times trying to create the perfect play thru, or at least as perfect as I can get it before something bugs out 🙂

I am on my third re-roll, each time siding with the Minutemen, working with the Railroad, and against the Institute and the Brotherhood of Steel. I also decided to wipe out the gangs of Nukaworld. Nukaworld is great fun, even if you are being a good guy. Although taking on the gangs does feel a bit genocidal at times.

The Drama With My New Laptop: the High Cost of Saving $350 (part 2)

This post contains a lot of profanity. Like a shitload.

When we last left our heroes, I had finally gotten Windows working on an SSD after trying a bunch of things, and then basically giving up and then reinstalling everything. Now that the SSD was working, the time had come to encrypt the SSD.

I am a fan of block crypto. I encrypt lots of things, not because I am worried about the government seizing my gear (well, not *that* worried) but because gadgets get lost and stolen. I lost my mobile phone a couple of years ago, and if I hadn’t encrypted it, it would have been nerve wracking worrying about what someone might do with the data that’s on it. So rather than worry about what is or isn’t protected, I just encrypt the whole drive. Full drive encryption is important because Physical Access is Total Access. I have rescued untold amounts of data for others from their crashed or otherwise misbehaving hard drives by removing them and plugging them into a different computer. I don’t normally encrypt the drives on my gaming rigs because if the FBI or whomever needs my Goat Simulator game saves that badly, they are welcome to them. This was a special case because it’s a gaming laptop. My rule is that if it leaves the house, it has to be encrypted.

Modern computers use UEFI to “securely” boot the operating system. I guess this is a security measure to prevent someone from booting your laptop from a CD and stealing all your shit, but since this laptop doesn’t have a Trusted Platform Module, Secure Boot doesn’t protect you from someone plugging your drive into another computer and stealing all your shit, I think it’s more trouble that it’s worth. If you have to ask Windows for permission to boot off a CD, it’s just going to stop the user from doing what he or she wants, it will not stop Proper Villainy(tm).

My favorite disk encryption tool, TrueCrypt, vanished under mysterious circumstances. I won’t get into the conspiracy theories behind its demise, but I have decided to keep encrypting my drive, and that leads me to the next chapter of this saga, where I get punished for using the basic version of Windows.

Part 2 – Solid State Drama’s Revenge

I prefer to run Windows on laptops because of all the bullshit proprietary hardware that goes into them. I am probably showing my age here, but there was a time when hardware support in Linux was spotty. I have swapped out Intel WiFi card for an Atheros cards in laptops to make sure I can do packet injection, but I now have a dedicated Kali laptop for that sort of thing. For my daily driver/EDC laptop, life is just easier with Windows. I know that that fucking with Linux makes a lot of dudes feel superior, and they probably are. For me, I prefer to use Linux for specific tasks (i.e. Kali and Clonezilla) or for servers. With that being said, I am not such a Windows fanboy that I care about the differences between Windows versions. My personal laptop won’t be joining an Active Directory domain, so I just go with whatever version came with my laptop, which I replaced with whatever version MS let me download when I migrated to the SSD.

This path of least resistance philosophy led me to entertain thoughts of using BitLocker to encrypt my hard drive, only I am not running Windows 8.1 Professional or Enterprise, so I guess that BitLocker isn’t included with my version. There is no fucking way that I’m forking over $150 for a new version of Windows after working so hard to save $200 on the RAM and SSD. No TrueCrypt? Fine. No BitLocker? Whatever. I don’t give a fuck. I’ll just use a fork of TrueCrypt called VeraCrypt. Well, VeraCrypt’s boot loader doesn’t play nicely with UEFI and GPT partitions. It only works on MBR disks. feelsbadman.jpg

So after days of messing with various tools to get Windows working on my SSD, and then enduring the hassle of setting up Windows all over again, and waiting on my Steam library to download again, I am faced with yet another hard disk challenge: converting my GPT partitioned drive to MBR without deleting anything. Honestly, now that Steam is in the Debian repos, I am sorely tempted to make my next gaming rig run Linux.

I tried a bunch of things and ended up using the pirated AOMEI tool to do the conversion, and it worked, sort of. The drive booted, and VeraCrypt didn’t bitch about GPT anymore. However, when I went to back up the drive one last time before encrypting it, I discovered that AOMEI half-assed the conversion. According to Clonezilla, my drive had some remnant of the GPT boot stuff left on it that I had to fix with the Linux version of fdisk for GPT, a.k.a gdisk. I have screwed up plenty of working partitions with fdisk, so I was nervous to say the least. Also, the magical -z option that I needed to was buried in the “expert” menu section (AKA Here There Be Dragons!) which added to the danger. Clonezilla said to run gdisk -z but -z isn’t a valid option from the command line.

I read this tutorial to figure out what had to be done, and in the end I just closed my eyes, clenched up my butt cheeks, and hit enter. I got it working, and thankfully I had already made plenty of backups, just in case. Speaking of backups, I should find a way to make running Clonezilla easier…

Update 8/16 – A few months ago, I tried migrating to Win10, but it was a shitshow. I just pirated Win10 Pro (thanks to KMSPico portable, JFGI) and used BitLocker without a TPM. This was less stressful since I set up easy bare metal backups in Part 3.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion in Part 3 – Making Backups Easy to do is Hard 🙂

The Drama With My New Laptop: the High Cost of Saving $350 (part 1)

This post contains a lot of profanity. Like a shitload.

I bought a new laptop a month ago, which for me is like moving to a new apartment. Getting it set up the way that I want it has been a total pain in the ass. Mostly because I have decided to save money by implementing key features myself, but also because the relentless march of progress in the PC market has left me behind. This was an uncharacteristic purchase for me, but I wanted a powerful laptop that I could write, code, play games, and run multiple VMs on. In short, I violated my first rule of personal computing, which is to use dedicated computers for specific tasks.

The goals were:

1. Be made mostly of aluminum – my laptops tend to have case or hinge problems before they have actual hardware problems, although when they do have hardware problems, it’s almost always the hard drive.
2. Be ready for anything – have 16gb of RAM, an SSD, USB3.0 and a high end GPU
3. Have a big screen and full size keyboard – this is replacing a full-sized laptop
4. Have ample storage – I also bought a caddy to go into the CDROM bay to house a second hard drive
5. Be encrypted – I normally don’t keep important things on laptops, or gaming rigs, but this is my main computer now
6. Be backed up regularly – I am not usually a stickler for backups because I use several computers. But with this machine, I want to be able to do a full disk image fairly easily

I have built enterprise servers in less time than I have spent tweaking this fucking laptop. I have more or less achieved all of my goals at the considerable expense of my time and possibly my sanity. There are three major sources of my discontent. The first is that copying a Windows install to a smaller drive is wildly difficult and Asus makes the process even more so. The second, is that Modern versions of Windows are not very friendly with the block crypto tools that I trust. The third is that because I decided to remove the optical drive, I wanted dual-boot Windows with my favorite cloning tool, Clonezilla.

Part 1 – Solid State Drama
I went with the Asus N550jx because it is a mostly aluminum mid-range gaming laptop with a big screen, full size keyboard with keypad, and a touch screen. I can sort of take or leave touchscreens on laptops, but my wife is a fan. I like for she and I to have the same model of laptop. That way, when she runs into problems, I am already very familiar with the hardware and software she is using. The N550jx comes in two models: one with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB mechanical HDD, and one with 16GB of RAM and a 240GB SSD. Both models have the same processor, GPU, screen, and case, and I was able to price another 8GB of ram and a 250GB SSD for almost half the price of the difference between the two models, for a savings of roughly $200. It was a mistake brilliant idea!

Getting the upgrades installed was a series of misadventures. The first obstacle was that for no good goddamn reason, Asus decided to use #5 Torx screws on the chassis. I have plenty of star bit screw drivers from working on Compaq computers back in the Dark Ages, but no #5’s. So what any red-blooded All American Man would do. First, I went on the Internet and complained, and then I ordered yet another set of screwdriver bits from Amazon.

With the SSD and RAM in place, it was time to get the OS off the mechanical drive onto the SSD. In the past, moving an install of Windows was simply a matter of shrinking partitions with GParted and cloning them with Clonezilla. With the Asus N550jx and Windows 8.1, there is a bunch of bullshit associated with hidden restore partitions with weird flags and whatnot. It is this bullshit that thwarted my countless attempts to migrate the partitions correctly. I even used pirated copies of notable commercial disk cloning tools like Norton Ghost and AOMEI with little success. After a few days of trial and error, I ended up just doing a clean install of Win8 on the SSD. Fortunately, Microsoft lets you create your own install media from an activated Windows system, and Asus is kind enough to make drivers and utilities available on their website for download. So after much installing of software, I had a working OS on the SSD.

All of this trial and error is why I am a huge fan of bare metal backups. I have used all manner of tools and other nonsense to back up Windows and/or data, and the only thing that is truly reliable is dumping the entire drive to an image file on a separate drive. Copying data always leads to missed files, and snapshots and restore points become corrupted especially when malware is involved. Rolling an infected PC back to a restore point is the fastest way to get rid of malware, so most crackers wipe out your restore points as part of the exploit process. Because of this, I don’t really care about recovery partitions, or restore points, or any of that other bullshit. If my laptop eats itself, I just want to roll it back to where it was just before the last time I tried to do something stupid to it. I understand that your typical consumer isn’t familiar with imaging hard drives, and that is why those other tools exist, but for me it’s Clonezilla or GTFO.

Stay tuned for Part 2: Solid State Drama’s Revenge 🙂

Video Games and Depression

I have battled with clinical depression for most of my adult life. The primary reason that I have maintained a weblog in one form or another is that writing is one of the ways that I deal with my depression. I also play video games. Writing and exercise are positive things that help me to feel productive. Video games are a tricky balance. In moderation, gaming helps me vent frustrations, much like exercise does. If I am not careful, however, gaming can go off the rails, and become basically the only thing that I do, outside of the bare essentials like not getting fired from work and keeping the children alive.

About 12 years ago I was working this horrible job as a help desk agent, taking borderline abusive tech support calls from cognitively-impaired corporate lusers. I was completely miserable and when I started playing Asheron’s Call, I slipped into full-blown video game addiction. My work day consisted of working on auto-pilot while surfing Maggie the Jackcat’s website for quests to run and items to craft. I would then stay up all night running various toons through said quests, and crafting said items. I even wrote a blog chronicling my adventures. It was pathetic 🙂 Then suddenly, I burned out on AC and when I stopped playing, I suddenly realized how miserable I was at work, and invested my energy into finding a new job.

A few years later, I got into City of Heroes pretty seriously. I was especially into multi-boxing and at one point, I was running 8 toons at once. Multiboxing turned my altaholism into a superpower. While I logged many hours playing CoH, it was not nearly as life-consuming as AC.

Today, my drug of choice is Skyrim. In many ways it’s less compelling than an MMO, but the story has caused me to have more than a few spiritual and philosophical reflections. One idea in particular is the attitude of many NPCs that the prophecy of the return of the dragons makes the end of the world a foregone conclusion. In the context of the game, if you are going to affect change, you are fighting not only dragons and undead, you are also fighting a culture of apocalyptic pessimism. As a parable for combating depression, I can’t think of a better interactive story.