I'm creating this thread with an intention not to clutter the Where are you thread? with things we discover in the Fallout University for the 1st time and would like to share them with others. Since some discoveries may be considered spoilers, read ahead at your own risk.

I'll copy some of my own posts from the Where am I thread:





And now I'm adding one event from today. Not sure what happened to the console but whenever I opened it, I saw that all previous fights have been recorded in details. I've never seen this before.

Here's a pic.

The most hilarious line is Alan Webb hits Alan Webb... ...because he tossed a grenade at a cazador and obviously hurt himself in the process.

I noticed in a previous playthrough that when you first start the game and walk behind the Goodsprings saloon there are no bottles on the fence. When you talk to Sunny Smiles and she says to come out back to learn about surviving in the Wasteland, there are stlll no bottles there. It is only after she hands you the varmint rifle that the bottles all magically appear out of thin air on the fence rails.

And IIRC those bottles can't be picked up either. You can drag them around but not actually pick them up.

The broc flower doesn't appear at the Goodsprings Cemetery unless you agree to bring ingredients to Sunny. I'm not sure if the same goes for xander roots outside the schoolhouse.

And now one from FO3 which I discovered not long ago: Vera Weatherly and Seagrave Holmes meet up on the flight deck at nights, I think it doesn't happen every day, though. Holmes tries to convince her that they should be more than friends but in vain.

Workbenches are more common than I thought in FO3! ... I dunno. I never paid much attention to them before. I want to take more advantage this time.

I use a mod which allows you to repair weapons on work benches, depending on your Repair skill.

Fallout 3: When we drop a frag mine in 1st person, the PC actually DROPS this item. I dunno. I play mostly in 3rd person, so I was assuming the character extends his/her arm out a bit, so that the mine doesn't just fall on the ground. But it does!

Not exactly ground-breaking news, but hey.

I met Ben Canning for the first time today. At first I thought that he's from some mod but a quick look on the Wiki proved me wrong, he's completely vanilla. Interesting that none of my characters ever met him before, not even as a corpse in case some wasteland creatures would kill him before our PC could approach him.

Ha ha hey! Janet just slashed a raider with her combat knife, and he screamed "my arm!" I had a look at a message on the screen and it said "Raider Arm Crippled," so that's a new thing for me!

I quote a more than one year old reply of mine from another thread just to say that a few days ago I found Ruzka for the first time. In Ally's game of course and because Ally has an animal friend perk, Ruzka wasn't hostile. Not sure if I found her if another mod (In the shadow of the swamp, a great mod BTW) wouldn't take Ally to a mod-added house and once leaving this house Ally explored some of its surroundings and not too far away she noticed an icon on the PipBoy, indicating a non-hostile NPC or creature. At that moment I somehow knew it is Ruzka.

Here's a proof.

I play with borders disabled, which I think makes finding Ruzka easier. She is right on the edge of the (normally) playable space.

I listened to your advice which you gave me in 2015, so since then I played with borders disabled. Looks like it paid off.

I usually come upon Ruzka from the west, over the top of the cliff above her lair. I think it is nice that she has a ball to play with. Though I wonder how she is still alive after 200 years.

There are some human remains scattered in her lair, probably from the swampfolk or other unlucky wastelanders. In a way she survives like Loviatar.

I always thought that Jeannie May Crawford is the only person in Novac who can direct you to Manny Vargas.

But a few days ago I found out that Cliff Briscoe can also direct you to Manny.

Now I'm curious whether some other important NPCs of Novac can direct you to Manny too.

Manny Vargas is the other sniper who sits in the Godzilla mouth right? I have always had Cliff direct my characters to him if he was on the off shift when they got to Novac. Cliff is usually the first person my characters talk to, because they go to him to sell their loot. Unless they spot the doctor wandering around first.

Yes, Manny is the daytime sniper.

It's the opposite in my case - my character talk to Jeannie May first as they want to rent a room.

Can the doctor direct you to Manny as well?

Hmmm, the first "person" Khajiit's characters usually talk to in Novac is Victor. Seems natural to this one that you'd want to talk to a familiar "face" first in a strange new place, if one was available. And Victor is very conspicuous hanging out by the main gate to the hotel.

True, most of my characters talk to Victor first as well but he's not much of a help when asked about Benny and directs you to locals instead.

Well if Khajiit is not mistaken, Victor points you towards the motel office and Jeanie Mae. To Khajiit, this seems like a logical progression, and Cliff gives you a discount if you tell him Jeannie Mae sent you.

I forgot to answer, the Doctor does not direct you to Manny.

SubRosa, you are right, Broken Steel is very thrilling so far.

And my new thing for today. Cho's been hanging in and around Tenpenny Tower the last two days. One day while he was leaving his apartment, a lot of other NPCs were leaving theirs. One of them said "dinner time!" in this extremely cheery voice!

This is different from any other Beth game. In Oblivion for instance, a lot of people will go to dinner in the Market District, after closing their shops. They won't SAY anything though, so "Dinner time!' in FO3 is a nice touch.

I completed Lonesome Road in Lee's game, this time I really took my time and explored the place as fully as possible, so I found a lot of places and stuff which I haven't found on my previous playthroughs.

To mention only a few, I found all six of Ulysses's logs, usually I ended up with four of rive. I think I've been missing out the first one because unlike others it's hidden inside a toolbox while others are directly visible.

I found and detonated 28/30 atomic warheads, the remaining two are in Courier's Mile which I don't have desire to explore but that still means that I found all in the Divide.

I found 4/5 ED-E's upgrades, if Lee's science was 75, he would find all five because one of them is in a room that can only be accessed with a high enough science skill.

When it comes to Ralphie's posters, I didn't perform so good, I found only 13/20.

Apparently finding all Ulysses's logs allows you to settle with him at the end but Lee just couldn't listen to him any longer so he killed him. Surprisingly, battle this time was very easy. I had a lot of troubles with Ulysses in Blondie's and Sylvia's game because he regenerates health at a ridiculously fast rate and turns on stealth boy when he's wounded. This time, however, Lee punched him only a few times and he was gone, definitely also because Lee has most if not all high-level melee/unarmed perks. So first he attacked him in VATS with Fist of Rawr and brought his health down to about 1/4. Then Ulysses cloaked himself but Lee was on his tail and kept punching him with Fist of Rawr yet he had to pause for a while to heal himself, not because of Ulysses though but because marked men and hostile eyebots jumped on him. When healed, he once again attacked Ulysses in VATS, using special moves Uppercut, Cross, followed by a regular attack and with the last blow Ulysses fell.

In the end the nuclear missile was directed at the Legion because Lee refused to sacrifice ED-E.

Apart from Fist of Rawr which will now become Lee's main unarmed weapon, he also wields the Blade of the West, the modified bumper sword. His protonic inversal axe got "lost" in the Divide and he doesn't feel like trekking all over the place to get it back. Besides, it's good to change weapons from time to time to keep things fresh and interesting.

I couldn't stand listening to Ulysses either. That guy sure loved to hear himself talk! I think I only did Lonesome Road once, in Annie Ley Oak's game. I didn't like how the game blames you for wrecking the Divide in the first place. So I was never eager to do it again. I started it with Hidetaka because she was not the Courier, just someone mistaken for being so.

Annie had trouble with Ulysses too. Not just because of his regenerating, but all those goons he has on his side that rush you. Killing all of them took forever.

Lee Cyeng was merely doing his courier job while in fact being undercover for the NCR, so Ulysses and his wannabe-philosophical ramblings quickly went on his nerves, he couldn't care less about them just like he couldn't care less about the Divide. He cared about ED-E, though, which was something I wouldn't expect before playing LR but there was a special bond between Lee and the robot, looks like he prefers machines more than men.

I remember that a lot of marked men would come and help Ulysses but this time there were far less so obviously their spawning is directly linked to Ulysses's death and once he fell, Lee only had to deal with those that were already in the temple and with just one more wave of them afterwards, then they stopped spawning.

Deathclaws respawn.

"Duh, lots of enemies do Renee!"

no, I mean, they respawn, but they do not come from percentage-chance leveled lists as are often found in ES games. Meaning that there is no chance of them not showing up. Meaning that they are basically hand-placed, and always come back after 3 days (I think it's 3 days in this game).

In other words, in the base game, raiders in (let's say) Super Duper Mart will not come back after we pwn them all. Deathies in Olney Power Plant will though. Because they are literally hand-placed with the respawn toggle on, every time. And this means that when Cho Zen Wan went back into Olney recently, I was expecting there to be no deathies in the initial tunnels. But they were all there, dangit.

And I admit no shame in saying I changed this in my game. Turned the respawn toggle off, because such a large land animal could not possibly replace itself in such numbers (we're talking about nearly a dozen of them in those tunnels alone) here on Earth. In Elder Scrolls games, you can always blame magic. "Oh, they come back because of magic!" Not so here in Fallout.

Man I'm so glad I'm doing Broken Steel on PC though. There's no way I would enjoy it on Xbox. Cho would not only have no followers with him, but he'd be forced to either fight all those deathies over and over, or he'd be relying on so much Stealth Boy it's not even funny.

They are like ants, mice, and cockroaches then?

So a couple days ago, I cleared out Fallon's Department Store (I'm pretty sure I had done that before, but whatever). But this time, the parking garage right next to it caught my eye. I hadn't gone in there before, so I decided to do this time. Lo and behold, it was a maze of sorts! It was a neat little thing that I had never encountered before. Plenty of traps and such along the way, but nothing too big to handle--although perhaps it would have been if I was a low level. Unfortunately, the payoff wasn't that great in the end, but it was still a cool thing I discovered.

You probably did clear it out. Not sure what the respawn times are, but most places do respawn after a while.

Heh, there are some fun things in the Parking Lot Funhouse. I imagine there were some really bored raiders around those parts.

Them stupid monkeys, though....

I actually love those kind of "trap" mazes; they are kind of like Easter Eggs to get through them (even if the loot is not the best). In Fallout 3 they had that maze of traps to get into "The Family" = I loved that thing!!! Of course, THAT maze had an awesome treasure at the end if you chose to wipe "The Family" out, lol. I know there were others; just can't remember them right now.

I've actually been pretty disappointed with the loot I've found in Fallout 4 overall; they have really focused the loot on being junk to convert for crafting. In Fallout 3 they had a lot of loot for making the crafted weapons; but there was also lots of real loot and some collectible loot (like the gnomes). It was more balanced; and really encouraged exploration.

I did find a great gun early on in the vault = a little overpowered for that level; but since I'd never played before I didn't know if I'd ever be able to get back into the vault again (aka Vault 101 in Fallout 3) = so I went ahead and console opened that lock. When I found out I could get back into the vault I felt bad about doing that.

There are a crap-ton of Bobbleheads and magazines in the Commonwealth, too. Also, the Beantown Interiors Project mod adds Drunken Gnomes to the game, as well as opening up a lot of the boarded off houses.

Opening up boarded houses? Awesome!!!! Drunken Gnomes sounds great; I'll have to work my way to that Beantown! Thanks for the info!!!

The name 'Benny' is on a gravestone in the graveyard above Goodsprings. I am gaming with Linda Hand and she crouched down and read this name. Not that it's THE Benny who is part of the MQ. But ya know...

That is a cool piece of foreshadowing, given how often *that* Benny ends up dead later on.

Linda Hand spent the night in NCR Sharecropper Barracks, which is a building outside of Vegas. When she went in the place it was 4 am, and I noticed how dark it was inside. She had been in these barracks before, and it was a lot easier to see. Sure enough, after she woke up (late morning) it was now brighter in there.

Sun always shines in Vegas.

I am gaming with Vicious today and she decided to head toward Super Duper Mart with her new friend.

They make it to the market and are hanging out doing whatever when all the sudden, all the other raiders start shooting and making all sorts of noise. Turns out, a random Wastelander NPC had rushed into SDM and this caused all the raiders to start going nuts! This has never happened in any of my other games, and I don't think it's caused by some mod.

Was it inside the building? I often find the raiders in the parking lot shooting it out with other wastelanders, but not inside.

Maybe it was that kid from Greyditch? He has super radar that can home in on your from a mile away?

Oh, this was inside of Super Duper Mart, not outside. And now that I'm doing a little gaming with her inside of Springvale another Wastelander did the same thing. Rushed inside the school, and got shot up within seconds.

Like I said, I have never seen this happen before, not that I remember, anyway. Whenever Cho is doing some delving into SDM or Springvale for instance, there's never a moment when a Wastelander has suddenly wandered in, and things start going haywire.

I do recall that sometimes in Bethesda games if an NPC is standing close to you when you go through a door, the NPC will teleport through it with you. I seem to recall it happening in Skyrim at least and I think Oblivion too.

Cho Zen Wan is in Tenpenny Tower, looking for somebody.

New thing: I just heard a Tenpenny resident say "I was worried about those ghouls, but thanks to you now I can worry about more important things. Like what color to dye my hair!"

Was that resident Floozie?

No, in fact it was some guy!

Then it was Ben D. Banano!

This is not a new thing I've discovered, it's a new method.

Cho Zen Wan has been going from Rivet City to the D.C. Mall area quite a lot over the past year. And he got tired of getting lost in those Metro tunnels. So he came up with this idea to use those red cones as markers (example here). These cones cannot be put into inventory of course, but he's gotten into the habit of grabbing one at a time, and then placing each one in a key area to make the proper path more obvious.

Still gets lost sometimes. But hey, overall it's an improvement..

If we throw a grenade into water, it causes the water to splash really high!

Am gaming with Cho in Fallout 3 this morning. I just heard a radio announcement in which Three Dog said "ghouls are people too, they're not some monsters from an old movie." Movies are therefore canon! They are definitely something which the CW had in its past.

And to me this suggests other forms of media which we don't necessarily see from Prewar times (newsreels, for instance) are also possible. Hmm. Isn't there an outdoor movie theatre somewhere in the wasteland?

There is a drive in theater somewhere north westish of Big Town, near the Potomac.

And Three Dog also describes supermutants as Frankensteins, which is either a book or movie allusion, or both.

Isn't there another drive in far to the south, east of the Tenpenny Tower?

Yes, that's right. There is one on a cliff overlooking the flat ground that runs along the southern map edge.

Am gaming with Cho / Fallout 3 this morning and he is in Moriarty's. We just heard a conversation in which Colin gives Nova flak for using chems on the job. "No more jetting!" he said.

I mean, if I think of all the times we've been in Moriarty's, and all the time Cho has spent relaxing with some liquor, listening to the radio. His game is 284 hours (less than I thought) but let's say he spends 5% of his time in Moriarty's.. I am guessing it's 4 or 5%, yet we've never heard that conversation before.

Cho Zen Wan is sneaking in Super Duper Mart and a raider was nearby. The raider got spooked. On Cho's Pipboy it went from HIDDEN to CAUTION.

And today's New Thing is, the raider ran forward and grabbed a weapon. But I think he grabbed it out of a nearby container. I dunno... I'll have to explore in a few, after the raiders are taken care of.

Edit: Never mind. There's nothing in the area where the raider grabbed from, no Metal Box or other container. Whatever weapon he grabbed must have been lying on the counter, or floor.