Vagrant0

It's a ghoul. Doesn't technically need to do either of those things.

Bethesda has said nothing, and is unlikely to give any indication until, at LEAST, the DLC starts rolling out. Even then, as much as I want the Brotherhood and Maxon to feature prominently, the main factions are unlikely to be involved. more likely, we'll get a footnote in Fallout 5. As far as official cannon goes, it probably won't matter. As far as the East Coast is concerned, the Brotherhood is the closest thing to an official government. Given how busy they've been in the Capital Wasteland, loss of an airship likely wouldn't be much of a setback, and might instead rally them in a full assault of Boston. Even if you sided with the institute, there isn't much the institute could do if their carrier signal got jammed since everything is locked off underground. The Railroad mostly loses its cause once the institute is destroyed. They aren't a military, they aren't a source of leadership, there isn't any way that they would continue after all is said and done. As for the Minutemen, although they fight for the people, they would likely buckle under the weight of the BoS and opt for being absorbed into the ranks instead of trying to fight a war of attrition.

I would report this as a bug on their official forums. It is either a screenspace or other software incompatibility with your videocard.

You still need some kind of water breathing mod. No idea about how right will underwater battles work. I never seen a game that done that right. Not even monster hunter games, and they have one of the best dev in that department not only in game, but the tweak and improvement they add in every title works outside of paper 90% of the time. Powerarmor, harpoon gun, and possibly some sort of addon similar to jetpack to allow moving under water. That would work. The part where it has problems is the part where you have enemies moving in 3d space. Bethesda has never been good with this. In Morrowind it was very buggy between the cliffracers and slaughterfish to the point where they only had slaughterfish in Oblivion, and where vertibirds in FO3 followed scripted paths. Even in Skyrim, dragon pathing was buggy, and the vertibird pathing in FO4 isn't much better. I see the potential being more along the lines of: An underwater research station where people continued to keep it up after the war similar to the vaults. Quite a bit of underwater stuff, possible similarities to Soma in terms of overall feel of environments. An Atlantic island community that remained isolated and possibly a further and final continuation to all the Dunwich stuff that was in FO3 and FO4. Not as much potential for underwater stuff, but more typical for Bethesda since it would allow them to throw in something Cthulhu like into the game. An entrapped and migratory group of ghouls and newcomers who live amongst the ships and wreckage that was swallowed by a giant ghoul blue whale, Pinocchio style. More of a wacky thing, but also feels like something Bethesda would throw out there.

the water value doesn't actually give you that amount of water. It is instead used just to determine if there is enough for the settlement. Having excess food, water, power, or defense doesn't seem to benefit anything.

Setting it too low can break some quests where NPCs have to interact with certain things, like terminals. This is because often these things are triggered by a command to do a package for several minutes, except that these minutes are in gameworld time instead of realtime. Setting this to 1 makes a package that is set for 4 minutes to take an actual 4 minutes before anything happens, which also seems to frequently end up being cleared from the NPC's AI because of normal processing behavior (such as the player walking close to initiate dialogue). There are other minor issues related to background processing, but this is the main one. I've set mine as low as 4 without too much of an issue, but I also fast travel frequently which allows most that background stuff to re-coordinate itself. But, I would not say that my game is working flawlessly as settlement behavior gets lagged, NPCs unresponsive, and settlement values get bugged from time to time. But most these issues may be bugged for other reasons.

I believe the locations for the radiant quests are based on those internal regions that are used to control things like flora and weather. Put simply, most the northwest corner exists within the same region, which also includes Lexington, and any of the settlements in that area will send you off to an un-cleared location within the same region where they reside. The way it decides which location to send you to is still screwed up on top of this (usually sending you to the furthest location within a region) making the system even more cumbersome and nonsensical.

Between all these and a conversation between a pair of caravan workers about a giant ghoul blue whale, I would say that it is extremely likely that they will do some sort of DLC that is more ocean themed. Other things also hint towards this, including resources for a spear gun weapon that is not used, and some people claiming to discover some sort of oceanic research station out in the bay. Then there's the interesting part about powerarmor being able to let you walk around underwater like a dive suit, and the perk to block radiation from being in the water.

Also, good luck figuring out damage for things like scatter attachments for lasers or shotguns which have their damage split between projectiles... Then factor in something like exploding shot or bleed damage which works on a per-projectile basis. A double automatic scatter laser rifle looks great from a statistic perspective since it has the highest combination of fire rate and damage, but ends up being completely horrible in use since only about 1/3 the projectiles hit the target if more than a few feet away, meanwhile the recoil makes it impossible to aim while shooting. As I was trying to explain before, the weapon system here may have math components to it, but a large part of it is based on things that devs added without too much thought towards how it actually works in the game, or not really testing projectile and hitscan physics very well. Damage values that you see in the world are an approximation at best, offset further by the armor of whatever you're shooting at.

The information is not clear, even when looking at it with FO4Edit since not all forms are decoded. Actual values will likely not be available until a GECK is released. But to add even more problem to the mix... The gauss rifle also has an explosion tied with the weapon hit. If this is like the gamma gun explosion, it also means that damage is dealt twice, once for the projectile, once for the explosion, with the explosion damage possibly being calculated twice depending on framerate.

Basically... The game won't automatically remove the turrets you have had to destroy, You'll have to disable or mark these for deletion in order to replace with your own turrets to count towards defense values. The beds and most the other things located in the locked rooms will not transfer ownership, worse, the doors will re-lock themselves. You will need to manually set ownership of the beds to be used by your settlers. The doors are a more complicated matter, scrapping them will remove them, but they cannot be easily replaced without building a door frame and then using console to move a door out of that frame and into position. The front doors are set to automatically close after opening. Setting their defaultstate to open can work initially, but will reset itself if the doors get activated again. Unfortunately you cannot scrap these doors so either have to deal with this annoying aspect (which makes it exceedingly difficult to do anything in workshop mode (see point below)). The only long-term solution is to just disable them. Settlers which move to the settlement will inexplicably walk outside and sit at the campfire that caravans stop at. Unfortunately this area is also quite a long ways outside the building area for the settlement. The problem really comes in with the doors that automatically close. See, in order to assign settlers to things like crops or shop stalls, you need to be in workshop mode, but the doors can only be opened in normal mode. Meanwhile you can only stand outside the borders of the settlement for 5 seconds before it cancels on you. This results in a very complicated situation of opening the doors while outside, switching quickly to workshop mode, running out of the border to tag a settler, then running back in before the doors close so that you can assign the settler to anything. Disabling the doors makes this less problematic, but still annoying. Unfortunately the alarm bell doesn't always work in bringing NPCs inside the settlement due to the door, and the fireplace. Fortunately since you killed everyone that was living there, you don't have to deal with all this as well as horrible NPC AI in a small enclosed space.

Believe it is related to some kind of strangeness with how NPCs travel to a settlement in general. Unless you arrive just as the attack is happening, the attackers just continue along to the settlement location while nothing reacts to them. This is because combat doesn't happen unless the player is nearby, meanwhile an NPC that is set with a package to travel to a location still eventually reaches that location even without the player witnessing it. I guess it is for this reason that settlers are protected against death. Bethsoft couldn't find an even ground between the two AI limitations, so accepted that settlers would just end up getting into combat. Best solution is to just clear out hostile locations near your settlement, and setup turrets both at the perimeter as well as inside the settlement. Having turrets around the inside will also help against synth infiltrators.

You only use it once. Kind of a waste, but that's how it is.

I wouldn't get too bothered by the actual value too much tbh. Happiness only relates to how much food, water, and junk gets accumulated in a settlement over time, and even then it is fairly slow unless you have most your settlements linked to share resources. I'd say that anything above 60 is perfectly fine, have not seen it play any part in how quickly a settlement grows, or how frequent attacks on a settlement might be.

Yeah, Maxon seems to have, for the most part, adopted the best elements of both Brotherhoods. He genuinely wants to help (even if he's kinda heavy handed about it) and isn't as puritanical as the (probably wiped out or at least fractured) East Coast brotherhood, but he also has that dogged military mentality and goal-driven attitude. Which makes sense, since he idolised Lyons, but also saw what happened when you tried to save everyone. Remember, the Brotherhood in Fallout 3 is on its last legs. It's not the unstoppable army that marched through the Pitt and slaughtered half the mutants in the city in a single night. It's a ragged, exhausted group bleeding its self dry on charity work when no one really cares. The Maxon didn't just shut the Brotherhood in and try to ignore everything like the Elders out West did, and that he managed to turn them into the closest thing we've seen to a nation on the East Coast, is impressive. Frankly, while i was uneasy towards them to start, Maxon is probably the best thing that's happened to the Brotherhood since his ancestor founded them. I'm sorta hoping for a king-Arthur reclaims the throne story with him in future DLC... It's very doubtful that any DLC will feature the 3 main factions since you can be hostile with all of them. DLC for FO4 will likely be of a similar thread to FO3's DLC. All of them being mostly an aside to the main story without any real connection. The other thing to keep in mind is that the America that existed before the war and which was the basis of mentality for both the BoS and the Enclave is very different from the real world America in this day and age. The pre-war America was heavily nationalistic, paranoid of anything foreign, very militaristic. I almost wish they extended the prologue out a bit longer so that they player is made more aware of how different the pre-war culture is and how superficial that feeling of a peaceful morning is. You get some of this from the television and some of the side comments, but the scripted events happen almost too quickly for most to realize it.

The settlement data bug is frequent and random. It seems to affect everything from settler amounts to actual happiness. Visiting will set it to the right amounts, but as soon as you go farther away it bugs out again. Once bugged, I havn't been able to figure out a way to make the settlement not bugged.

Turrets are just like any other NPC. Once you have more than 20 or so of them reaction times start to take a hit due to processing demands and scene complexity. You don't have just the turrets or the settlers, but also the whole environment within a 5x5 cell area loaded. The Castle is small and mostly on its own, with turrets either having complete line of sight or not. The drive-in is surrounded by land, and is very open, so more turrets have to do line of sight and distance checks.

From my own poking around the game uses 2 different variables to determine respawn time. The first one which is around 168 hours (or 7 days) happens in cases of cells which are not flagged as cleared. These are usually exterior cells or minor encampments that are not marked on the map. The second one is around 480 hours (or 20 days) and relates to locations that are marked as "cleared". I think it is those locations which can get marked as "cleared" which contribute to some sort of internal "threat" value for a settlement that is used to determine frequency of attacks. This also seems to explain why settlements aren't often attacked you keep doing minutemen quests (since it sends you out to these locations). But without being able to look at the actual scripting, this is all just a guess.

I don't know why we can't just have both. While there is a lot of weapons and combinations through the modding system to have. There is a distinct lack of unique looking weapons in the game. Other than the Alien Blaster, I can't think of many. Also, I'm severely disappointed there is no "That Gun". I want my Bladerunner pistol in a game about synths. That is part of it. An ideal system in my opinion would make use of everything available. First you would have those random legendary weapons with random effects. Then you would have unique weapons with unique effects or variants of those random effects, with a special look. Then to add another layer of things, you could use the random mod system to introduce mods which aren't constructable. These would be upgrades or side-grades to existing pieces but have a unique look. Like automatic versions for the different chamberings for the pipe pistol. Like other mods you would be able to either use these as they are, or pull them off and attach them to another weapon. This would keep those unique weapons as being unique, keep loot being interesting, but also give further loot options for those people who want to customize weapons.

I'm actually favoring the FO4 legendary system to the old system of singular uniques. If you're farming legendaries for effects, I think you might be really missing the point. The advantage of this system is that it creates more variance when you replay the game, such that the things you find in one playthrough won't appear in the next one, so your play experience can be different to a degree. My only complaint is that few of the effects are particularly interesting, and most of those placed uniques end up being outclassed quickly or about at the point you can finally afford them, eg instead of getting "Swan's Fist" you just get a powerfist with an effect that can be found on just about anything else if you want to work at it.

Until we have a GECK, there isn't any real way to look at the logic behind it. I have had settlements well above 300 defense still get attacked, so defense alone doesn't mean anything. Most of my settlements are either at 30 or 18 water and ~18-24 food depending on when I last moved people around. so it is not related to any sort of abundance. I have had a 6 person settlement with 8 food, 12 water, and ~180 defense get attacked. I have also had a 19 person settlement with 24 food, 30 water, and 400+ defense get attacked (with 3 guards). So it is not related to population or how able that population is able to defend themselves. I would be tempted to think that it is just a random check based on how long it has been since a settlement has last been attacked... But have had the same settlement attacked twice in a row, within 7 days of eachother, as well as 2 attacks on different settlements happening almost one after another. At the moment, my only guess is that it is more strongly related to how many of the locations near a settlement have recently been cleared, then offset slightly by above factors. In my experience, most those settlements which exist in areas I frequently visit and clear out are also those settlements I don't see attacks happening.

Finally tracked down a new bug that is related to random "xxx disliked this" notices popping up when around Goodneighbor. The cause of this bug is a random event that occurs in the area involving an NPC (Art) and a Synth duplicate (Art) of that NPC. Unfortunately the way they are scripted it makes them start shooting eachother causing the relationship hit. Even if you try talking to them, none of the dialogue solutions end the conflict. Even if you kill one, the other just starts attacking you. If you kill both, or either, they will just respawn causing further relationship hits just because they are in the area. Have not found any easy solution for this. Only solution I seem to have found is by heavily changing their forms to just make them spawn as dead and cause no crime hits. But this is a very dirty edit that I'm not even sure is working.

Dialogues suggest that they are indeed recruiting or maybe even drafting people into their ranks on the East coast. And probably only because of absolute necessity.

Has anyone found anything that he actually likes? He doesn't care about helping settlements, open locks, or hack computers, or stealing things. He doesn't care about you killing people either. He gives disapproval if you use power armor. He seems to give disapproval for picking up junk.

Bethesda took alot of flak in FO3 by making the Brotherhood so friendly. Having them return to their west coast values puts them more in line with original lore. In a way, it makes perfect sense for the eastern branch to change. After the expansions for FO3, the BOS had full run of the Capital Wasteland and a whole store of military resources from the enclave remnants that were destroyed. This led them to become a more substantial military power since they were not as dependent on the kindness of settlements in the area for survival. From the Macready's dialogues and many of the terminals you can see that they pretty much took over killing anything that did not fit their ideals or bend to their will. This feels very intentional, making fans of the Brotherhood from FO3 start to question their intentions while making all three main factions their own shade of gray. The Institute has good intentions, but has been misdirected by generations of being underground and disconnected with the people of the commonwealth. The BOS has a noble goal, but has become embittered and more fanatical in trying to achieve that goal. The Railroad is trying to help, but is too involved with their whole cloak and dagger thing to care much about anything else. The Minutemen have the least going for them outside the player's involvement, but are the only ones who actually seem interested in making things better for everyone without pushing some sort of agenda.