I've been going through the story missions and side missions slowly and carefully, trying to optimize the missions that I can play for each faction before pissing them off. Trying, for example, to do as many missions with the Brotherhood as possible before getting into a fight with them. This means that I have a few missions that are "active" which I cannot complete yet because they'll trigger a showdown of some kind. This has been going well so far. I think I've decided that I want the endgame's winning faction to be the Minutemen, because I view them as the least evil of the four possible factions. But part of me wants to see the Brotherhood questline to the end, because I want to see...


Anyway, for anyone playing the game still, there is a 1.3 patch coming which will fix some bugs. Some interesting ones that will be fixed:



Damn. I was really enjoying that. There is a battle that occurs at Bunker Hill at one point in the game, and since I was friends with all the battling factions at the time, I was able to stroll through that mission without being shot at. This allowed me to leisurely collect some Gauss Rifles (a kind of railgun) dropped by the combatants. An upgraded Gauss rifle, combined with the bugged MacCready headshot perk, combined with a lot of points in the Rifleman ability, basically turns all combat in the game into a point-and click affair. Super mutants? One shot. Legendary glowing ones? One shot. Coursers? One, maybe two shots. Legendary Deathclaws? Two shots. Ah well, you can't have everything.

I'm wondering if it will also fix a couple of the inventory exploits. It doesn't say. There's one exploit where you can manufacture tons of resources for your settlements by exploiting a timing hole in the "Store all junk" and "take all" buttons at a settlement workshop. I've been using that one just so that I no longer have to worry about collecting random junk for resources when I'm out in the wasteland doing missions. Makes adventuring slightly less hassle because I run out of inventory space a lot less often. There's also one where you can exploit a timing hole when Dogmeat "fetches" an item which will let you duplicate that item. I wonder if that one will be fixed.

I also wonder about this one?



I wonder if that was the reason I lost Piper for so long?

I've been traveling with different companions, slowly working them up to max-affinity during our travels, taking their perk, and then moving on to another companion. I'm in the middle of Deacon right now. I missed my chance at getting X6-88 as a companion due to being excommunicated from his faction, but I think I can get the rest of them. Danse is on hold because I have to complete the Brotherhood questline before he becomes available (I think). I'm saving Curie until after I complete the main story line.

I was looking at ways to increase companion affinity, and I read this article which works but is kind of annoying to execute because it requires a game reload for each cycle. What I found most hilarious was this quote in the replies:



I find this hilarious from a game-theory-runs-counter-to-reality perspective. I can't bring myself to do it though.