I discovered something else about Home Plate. You cannot dismiss companions there. Hecate just met Codsworth and had him help clearing out Sanctuary Hills. Afterward she dismissed him, thinking he could be her new robo-butler back home. But Home Plate does not show up on the list of places you can send a dismissed companion to.

Dang, I never realized that. I rarely buy it, though, and usually end up with Starlight or Taffington as my home base.

Khajiit doesn't really like Homeplate. Sure it's convenient to DCM, but the full settlements offer much more freedom to set its layout however you want. That's why Khajiit likes Hangman's. It's reasonably close to DC and has a compact area that is easy to fortify. Perfect spot for an inner-city outpost (though admittedly too small for a main base, imo).

I just found out that you can use Chem Stations that are underwater! Hecate was at Thicket Excavations, when it was still filled with water. She swam over the chem station and built some ammo (thanks to a mod). Then she shut off the leaks and swam back out.

Lol

Ok, so, Khajiit got his mods reinstalled and now he's ready for more Commonwealth adventures (and misadventures lol). Thus one wants to try something a bit different this time, a Raider/Tribal type character using the "I was with a Raider gang" start from the mod Start Me Up. Khajiit will be playing as a female as he prefers the female voice over the male one. Stay tuned for story and pics!

Has the mod been working well, Khajiit? I have it tracked but am not sure about it due to how much it affects.

So far so good. It's a tad bit wonky due to the restrictive nature of the Main Quest, but they did a decent job working around it. Everything we've done so far is documented in the thread Victorian Commonwealth. Through it you can see some of the ways they worked around the MQ.

The guy in this article is ridiculous! He supposedly finished the game on Survival mode playing "dead is dead". It's a really funny read; a cautionary tale of the dangers of buffoonery while playing with such user imposed "high stakes".*

*Warning: article contains expletives and very very minor spoilers.

Have a really strong urge to make an unarmed and pistols "The Crow" character.

Thanks to the Cryolator, I continue to think about playing a Captain Cold/Mr. Freeze-type character. The Cryolator itself uses too much ammo, and is too powerful/inaccessible in the early game. So they would need a modded cryo gun like this one for at least the beginning of the game.

Tonight's forecast; a freeze is coming!

Ok everyone... chill!!

Kim-Ly Nguyen made her return last night. Really want her to use fully automatics this time.

I started playing Killer Frost today, and I was surprised that Codsworth could say her name. Well, not her entire name. He calls her Frost. Which was a pleasant surprise.

It's good that you found a name Codsworth can say! It's also very nice that if Khajiit wants to make a character named Big ol' Boobies Coddy will call her Ms. Boobies.

Killer Frost is my first character to wear a vault suit. I am surprised at how many NPCs remark on it. It is pretty neat.

She also started using a cryo laser pistol with a beam splitter as a backup weapon. It works great on the small, quick critters like bloatflies and radroaches. It is also really handy against ghouls in close quarters. I am liking it a lot more than I thought I would.

I have been having something weird going on in Killer Frost's game. Essential NPCs are dying. First was Ada, who was killed in the big fight outside of Wattz Consumer Electronics where the Mechanist questline starts. Now Jack Cabot keeps getting killed in the final part of the Cabot House questline, when we are on the way to Parson's to face his father.

The weird thing is that I checked with the console, and they are set as essential (the command is ID isessential). But if I try to set them as essential with the console, it gives me an error message.

So some weird bug has suddenly started in this game. I don't have any mods that change NPCs essential status. I wonder if one of the recent updates has caused the bug?

Well that's a serious problem. Probably was something the stupid Creation Club nonsense jacked up. Khajiit may test that as soon as Victoria gets the radio message. Is your game running the latest patch?

I do have the latest patch. But I quit and restarted, and afterward the console command to set NPCs essential worked on Jack. He survived the entire battle of Parsons, so it must have worked. I imagine Ada is still dead though. I have not gone back to check in a while. But I can use the resurrect command on her, and the setstage commands to get that quest going if I really need to.

Hmmm, strange. Well at least it's working for you now.

I got Ada resurrected. But she would not stand up. Instead she just crawled around on the ground. I found that disable and enable fixed that, and she worked normally. Well mostly. In the final battle with the Mechanist she got killed. I checked with the console, and she was still marked as essential. After I resurrected her again, she commenced to walk up the walls and then levitate around the room. Just another day in a Bethesda game...

Then when I tried to dismiss her later, I never got the option to send her to a settlement. And she did not dismiss. Instead she continued to follow me around. I had to recruit another follower to truly dismiss Ada. Apparently this is a well-known issue with Ada however, not a new bug.

Lol, quick! Someone call the Exorcist! Ada is possessed by the devil!!

Hecate built a stone wall completely surrounding Sanctuary. The only way in or out is at the bridge, which is blanketed with gun turrets. But two days in a row there have been Raider attacks that began inside the settlement. The Raiders seem to be spawning in one of the houses at the mouth of the cul-de-sac, on the north side of the settlement.

Is that normal? I built the darn walls to keep Raiders and other pests out!

Nice!! It looks positively imposing!

I spent hours building that wall. I am still filling it with turrets. Now it all seems to have been pointless.

Sadly, attackers spawning inside settlements seems pretty common. It appears that Bethesda never imagined that people might want to defend their settlements with walls (what a crazy idea after all. It is not like anyone has ever done that in human history!).

It is possible that not fast-traveling to a settlement under attack, and instead fast traveling to someplace nearby and hoofing it the rest of the way will keep them from spawning inside. But I am not positive. I am going to see if I can find the spawn point in the Construction Kit and move it.

Yeah you can definitely move that spawn point. Khajiit has played around with this a little bit.

It looks like it is the X-Marker Headings that they spawn at. But they are all located outside my walls. Perhaps they spawn within a certain distance of the X-Markers? I will have to try moving them back farther.

Hmmm, yeah try that and see what happens. Weird.

I rediscovered a neat trick today that I had forgotten. The cage doors with metal bars latching them can be shot open from a distance. Hecate just did that with her sniper rifle to open the doors to the Mirelurk pens in Thicket Excavations. It was fun to watch the chaos that followed from a safe distance!

I now recall that I did it once before, in a little shack on top of a building. The door was latched from the inside so you could not get in. But you could see it through an open window. That time I shot the latch through the window and the door popped open.

Cool! When next Khajiit was plays he’ll be on the lookout for these doors!

Fellow Commonwealthers beware - there is an update dropping today for FO4.

I just avoided it by shutting down Steam and going to offline mode. What pains in the rears these guys are.

I have been having a weird bug for several months now. Essential status does not work on any NPCs in the game. I first found this out a while back when going to first meet Ada outside Wattz Electronics. She was killed by the Mechanist's robots before I could even reach her. Needless to say, she is essential. I had to use the console to resurrect her, and add health to her, in order to finish the Mechanist questline.

I found similar things happening to other companions. I have used the console on their dead bodies, and they are indeed set to essential. I recently tried a mod that changes essential npcs to protected. But even after that I found Lucas Miller dead, when he is supposed to be invulnerable (people joke about nuking him).

I have only found a post of this ever happening to one other person over a year ago. Of course there was no solution mentioned. I have tried disabling all mods except the official DLCs. But that still does not change anything. So it must be something in the core game.

I am now trying a full reinstall of the game.

Very weird. Have you downloaded any of the patches since Creation Crap?

Yes, I have been keeping it up to date. I thought it might be an update that caused the bug. The one person I have seen posting the same issue did so over a year ago. So I don't know what to think.

In other news, I got the game reinstalled, and added the mods all over again. It worked for a while. Now Mod Organizer magically stopped working. It refuses to start with F4SE. This is a known issue with Mod Organizer. It has happened to me a long time ago in the past. But I cannot remember how I fixed it. So far none of the suggestions I have found have worked.

Damn. One thing after another, smh

I fixed it by deleting Better Console, an F4SE mod.

There you go! Glad you figured it out!

Ha! I've been here so many times... like being in a desert full of thirst, you keep seeing that mirage just ahead...

Interesting. I was looking at that mod, but decided against it. I don't use the console very often, so it didn't seem necessary.

I typically only use it for getting selfies and using tcl to get unstuck.

Yeah it was pretty much crucial in the older games because getting stuck in the environment was just a fact of life (or falling through overpasses to your death *looking at you Fallout3*). Khajiit can honestly say he’s never been stuck in the environment in Fallout4 though.

What is really weird is that Better Console was working fine in my old game install. And it was working fine in the new install for a while. Then it just magically stopped working one second. So maybe I will be able to use it again in the future.

I like the console for getting the ids of modded items, so I can add them directly to my character's inventory. It is also handy for applying a legendary effect directly to a weapon or armor piece. I found using the console was a lot simpler and easier than using a mod to do the same thing. When I find an item with a legendary enchantment I want to use, I use the console to get the id of the enchantment. Then I drop my gun or armor and use the console to select it. Then it is as simple as using the amod command to add the legendary enchantment to the item. Then I use the console to markfordelete the original legendary item from the game.

The console is also good for summoning missing NPCs, especially companions who vanish into thin air. Though in this case you need to click on them while they are still around to get their id. But after that you can use prid and moveto player to bring them to you at any time. I had to do that so often with Serana in Skyrim, that eventually I created a batch file to run from the console.

I use TCL in Fallout 4 a lot for getting down from the roofs of buildings. I could go back inside the building, then back out to ground level from there. But that means going through two load screens. I could watch the Lord of the Rings in that time. So I use TCL to walk down to the street instead. Except with the characters like Killer Frost who have jetpacks, or Persephone who is immune to falling damage. They just jump/fly down.

Console aside, sadly I lost all of my F4 saves during the uninstall and new install. It is not the complete end of the world though. At least I had saved both Hecate and Annie's faces to LooksMenu presets already. So they are safe and able to played again at any time.

The real kicker is that I still don't know if I fixed the issue with Essential status not working. I probably won't for a while yet.

My solution to this was having an Acrobat legendary effect on both pieces of leg armor. 100% less falling damage.

Good news, I didn't lose my saves! I found the backup I forgot I made before I did the reinstall.

But I already started a new playthrough of Killer Frost, so I am going to stick with it. I am not using Start Me Up this time. Maybe that is what caused the Essential status problem? Instead I used the Same Sex Couples and LGBT Families mod. I think I am going to try doing the main quest one more time with Frost, and try the BOS line. Frost does not know anything about the Brotherhood, so unlike Hecate or Annie, she can go into them without any negative opinions.

Killer Frost teamed up with Codsworth for the last few days. They did not have a truly serious fight until today though, inside Corvega. Just like before, Codsworth was killed. I checked with the console, and he is indeed still marked as essential. So my issue of essential characters dying is still present, even with the clean reinstall. *sigh*

I just tried to Google it. First I had to wade through all the "how do I make essential NPCs killable?" results.

Only thing I've come up with is uninstalling all mods and starting from scratch, but I assume you've already done that.

Another thing I'm thinking of though is I wonder if there are any scripts running in the background that might cause this? I don't know how Fallout 4 works, but for Skyrim, Beth began making seperate files for scripts, that are external to the .esps and .esms. In other words, even if you get rid of all your mods, sometimes scripts will still continue to run in the background if these aren't removed as well. Maybe there's a script or two that's causing this. These would be .pex files, I think the folder path would go Data > Scripts, and somewhere in there are a lot of scripts.

I don't know, I'm guessing here.

I did do a full reinstall from scratch. So that made no difference.

It could be a script from a mod. But the weird thing is, the NPCs are not having their essential status removed. They are still marked essential. Essential is simply not working at all. Which to me suggests an issue with the core game files itself. All mods can do is remove someone's essential status, or change it to protected, etc...

A scripted kill overrides essential in Skyrim so I'd expect FO4, too. Then the essential status is just being used to ensure they die only at the right point in the plot. So is Codsworth always being killed at the same place/by the same NPC?

No, it was just part of a random battle. He took too much damage, and died. Even though he is essential. It is the same with all the Companions I have tried in the game, who are all essential. Plus some other NPCs who are also essential.