Back to Fallout.
4.
Sanctuary really is cursed in my game. The last time I played, it had gotten really choppy again, and I got stuck behind a loading loop in Cabot House. It would really eat all of the memory in my machine - lock it up so bad I could barely manage to sign out to break it. Today I came back and traced it back to an event in Sanctuary. I had like, 12 consecutive saves at different points there. Somewhere between those, something unseen changed and my game was basically lobotomized by it, just having the appearance of functioning.
Coming back from The Mechanist's Lair, I almost filled up a total capacity of 660 between Ada and my character. I was in Sanctuary, with a lot of stuff to drop and do. I had to set up a new weapon, break down all of this stuff, organize the goodies. I saved at different points in the long process of shuffling a ton of crap around. Somewhere towards the last 5th of that run, the curse struck. That's probably when the lag hit and made Cabot House go weird. Outside of the house I thought the metro area nearby made it lag. It's true what they say - no matter how you mod or what machine, parts of Boston proper will always lag. But then it was just as jumpy inside of the house. After going back a few saves, that was fixed. I don't even know what I did in the jacked up saves - it looks like I was pretty much finished unloading and setting up. I can't access them - they don't load.
So it looks like I'm getting outta dodge. It's packed with settlers anyway. 19 of them. I don't need them where my stuff is. Or all of my water purifiers and crops lol. I've got over 300 points in defense and the turrets are all very effectively placed on wooden risers. But still, all of that means robots and deathclaws and raiders and everything else attack. It's pretty hilarious, you just hear all of the turrets lock in and chime in chorus before a choir of bullets accompanied by a bright orange aurora reaches out in the distance. It goes for maybe 5 seconds, and then they wind back down... it's really just concentrated death beams for long, continuous and open stretches along the path from every enemy spawn point. 9 turrets at the end of each 'fire line' choke point. Stacked up on increasingly higher platforms, like an orchestral string section on bleachers. Everybody is also armed with a mix of automatic combat shotguns and whatever legendaries are no good for me. Sometimes the music barely starts. Its only reaching full intensity as I loot the bodies.
Man, that's an annoying distraction when you're sorting your loot though, lol. And then if they happen when you're not there, the game can somehow calculate enemies entering anyway. So you'll load in to find them walloping your stuff, killing your people. Your stuff gets damaged and needs repairs. Items can go missing from containers, looted by enemies. Those people sometimes don't come back. This can pull you away from other things, if you notice the little blip in the corner of the screen. Usually it just happens and you don't know. Settlers may just mutter about how they knew you would fail. Just forever salty. Leaving you wondering what you lost.
I wouldn't care if my precious stuff wasn't at risk! You can wall-out all of the spawn points. They can still be in there. You just have to be somewhere else when it triggers. The guesses it makes on the positioning of things isn't very accurate. This causes other bugs, too. Like cows getting stuck in places they never had a way to get IN to. Or characters getting stuck on roofs. The game keeps constant time, and then ever spot has basically reference tables from the last time it was calculated. When you load it again, it pulls that table and fills it in over however much time has elapsed since it was 'signed'. I think the calculating it does for paths and obstacles just isn't very granular. It had problems with heights and certain types of openings. It also has that bethesda personality. I have found Preston standing and gazing contemplatively in the middle of an actively radioactive river too many times...
I could have my stuff tucked in the middle of nowhere, nothin really vital to come after. Away from the hot zone that is all of that. And not a ton of scripts bugging things out. I'll make Ada into an unstoppable double-laser-gatling, face-laser-mosntrosity of a sentry bot and have it (?) run goods for me. Nothing out there can take that out. Not an essential NPC with weapons that calculate to cruel DPS levels in companion mode.
Though I might not need that measure. I'm gonna flip the console, TGM, grab everything, fast travel to the spot I pick, set up containers to organize, and drop it all at once. That'll just be my hidey hole, where I go between outings and quests. Quiet, just doing what I need to do with nothing happening or cursing my saves. Build Sanctuary out into a big farming/water harvesting spot for other settlements. I can go there for tons of vital adhesive ingredients and purified water needed for crafting. Both Sanctuary and Red Rocket have failed me the same way. When you fill them out, they become so unstable they create pinholes in the Fallout 4 universe. Todd Howard reaches in and starts fiddling with your mods. That corner of the map is a bermuda triangle of script behavior. It's an otherworldly place. Those settlements bend the confines of digital physics.
After dealing with that, I finally got to enjoy the WOUNDING laser rifle I grabbed in the Mechanist's Lair. I happened to pluck a legendary robot zooming on a hanging line overhead somewhere deep in the belly of that dungeon. VATS scouted it. I tapped and saw the star, scoped in and took my shot with the two-shot hunting rifle. It would've just gone by and I wouldn't have gotten that crazy prize. But I got it.
The laser rifle is a cool weapon, but it's a little weak later on. I wish it was slightly less nerfed. I did shift that a little, but didn't want to press it too far. However, the bleed from the wounding perk is 25 points of stacking fast-trickle damage that ignores all armor and resistances PER projectile. The laser rifle can be a fast automatic. You can also then put a 'scatter' attatchment on it. Each individual beam counts for seperate bleed damage. So each of those beams in those tenaciously-rapid automatic flurries are toasty waffle-smacks of a couple hundred points of bleed damage tacked-on. It's the bug-sprayer. And it works on bugs of all species and size. I just find the scatter too much recoil on top. It becomes too hard to control outside of close range. Even as a regular automatic, it is devastating to tanky enemies. Maybe as a semi-auto scatter, it would be killer. Each of those blasts carries a lot of damage. If I can fling that well into moderate ranges, that's a death-blower. Like in Luigi's Mansion, but backwards. A wall of damage just kinda slaps down in a cascade. Lumbering, but assured death.
