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 Opening Theme Underrail is an isometric CRPG created by a small, mostly Serbian, development team originally released in 2015. Its first The game features turn based combat, a sprawling world to explore full of memorable locations, multiple approaches to situations, and all the mushrooms you can eat. It is also hard as balls, being a highly unforgiving experience and at times, outright bullshit. In spite of this, it's also one of the most enjoyable isometric CRPGs that I've played in a long while and when I finally finished the game for the first time, I found that I truly adored it. If you were ever a fan of the original Fallout games, then you may well enjoy this game. This is a game that is all about its setting, but what is the setting of Underrail you ask? Underrail takes place many centuries after a fairly ambiguous global catastrophe that left the surface of the Earth entirely uninhabitable. The last vestiges of humanity now live a harsh existence in Underrail, a vast underground array of subway tunnels, maintenance passages, and cavern networks. The game itself takes place entirely within South Underrail, which is conveyed to be something of a backwater. Life there is shorter and much more brutal than in North Underrail, and the people are as tough as they are rude. Most live in small train station communities and our protagonist will be someone who has just become a newly accepted candidate to one of those communities, South Gate Station (SGS). This will be a screenshot lp that I will try to release episodes with as much regularity as I can reasonably muster. I hope you enjoy! Oh and I guess it goes without saying, but none of your "Gorsky is secretly an extra-dimensional being from beyond time and space!" plot spoilering and other sorts of rumor mongering in this thread, please and thank you. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Jan 24, 2024 |
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Dec 14, 2022 18:32
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Chapter 0 - Character Creation To begin with we have the four difficulties to pick from.      I should note I have only successfully played this game all the way to the very end once, and I did so on normal. I'm not entirely against the idea of playing on a higher difficulty but I would like to guarantee that I can actually finish the game on this playthrough so I will probably be playing again on normal. The only major drawback is we won't be able to fight some optional bosses which are only available on DOMINATING difficulty, but that's assuming I'd know how to beat them anyway. Given the game mechanics, it's not actually possible to see everything on a single playthrough of this game so it's really not that big of deal. Next we will need to choose the method by which will gain experience.   The key difference here will really depend on our approach to the game. Classic XP is better for a game where you aim to kill drat near everything and take advantage of various skills. Whereas in the oddities xp playthrough, its much better to focus on exploration based skills, pickpocketing and so forth. There are still oddities that can only be obtained from combat, but it does complement a more stealthy approach to most situations. I will leave it up to thread to decide which one I should pick. Bear in mind that you still find oddities on classic mode, they just give you a small amount of xp instead of majorly contributing to your leveling up scheme. Character Creation  To start with, we have a number of things to choose. Our portrait and name. Our gender, which has relatively minor effects on the game here and there. And then our primary attributes. We get 5 free points to spend, and we can lower any attribute to 3 to gain a few more. These numbers are pretty important and we can only gain a free primary stat point to spent once every 4 levels up to level 24. As such we don't get a lot of opportunity to modify them permanently past this point so we will pay close attention to each of the stat descriptions. Primary Stats  Strength is obviously great for hard hitting melee weapons. Do note that bigger weapons all have minimum strength requirements, and this includes firearms. If we don't meet these requirements we will take a non-trivial penalty to our chance to hit, which is bad. It affects our carrying capacity, and carry weight is a seriously important commodity in this game we're gonna want to lug around a lot of stuff most of the time. High strength can also give us the means to push or pull heavy objects in the environment when permitted. It also helps us intimidate others.  Dexterity is for thieving like skills and beyond all that it makes us good at fishing. It's absolutely critical if you want to make a build around using light weapons as it will greatly increase the number of attacks in a single turn. Death by a thousand cuts is a very viable strategy in this game.  Agility can be extremely handy no matter what build you're going for. Mostly because the best way to avoid damage is to forgo any chance of being hit in the first place. Really high agility can also gives us the means to act more in a single turn, which is the key to success in turn based games. On top of this agility gives us a great way to move about in the world, as there are many instance of jumpable gaps, ledges, or narrow cracks in rubble. It's also handy for being naturally stealthy.  Constitution is pretty self explanatory, it keeps you alive for longer. If you want to be a walking brick wall who shrugs off massive damage and can keep on acting after a sledgehammer to the chest, or a swift kick in the groin, then constitution will give you the means to do that. Conversely, if you intend to end fights as quickly as possible, you probably don't really need it all that much. Although not dying to every landmine you step on, or hand grenade thrown at you is a blessing in and of itself.  If we're going ranged, then perception is king. Naturally it improves accuracy at a distance. It's also great for finding traps before you stumble into them, irrespective of your traps skill, and Underrail is nothing if not trapped. There are also a great many hidden objects, secret doors, and concealed passageways that perception will locate for us. It also assists greatly with spotting the myriad of stealthed opponents before they have a chance to act. If you're up for exploring as much of underrail in a single playthrough as possible, then this is a must have skill.  Will is largely used to govern our effectiveness with psi skills as well as helping us resist any psi attacks leveled against us. If we're going heavy into psi, we want this. It's also used to a lot in dialogue especially where resisting pain is concerned and has an appreciable affect on our ability to persuade others. It's important to note that will is the only major way to affect your characters resolve stat which most protects you against psi attacks which target you mind directly.  Intelligence is what we want to assist in our crafting endeavors. Unlike a lot of games released in the wake of Minecraft that introduced crafting mechanics, this game actually has a very robust and well implemented crafting system that is worth understanding to make the most out of what the world gives you. What will at first seem like worthless junk, will begin to be seen as game changing treasure. There is very little in this game that cannot be used as a crafting component in some useful manner. It is possible to play the game and ignore it, but you do yourself a big disservice in doing so, there are a broad range of crafting skills and Intelligence helps you with all of them, as well as any technical thieving skills and it will also help us get better deals from merchants. Feats We next need to put our starting points into the many skills this games but I will briefly cover feats first. I won't cover them here in great detail as there's way too many of them and most will be unavailable to us anyway since the majority of them are heavily level, stat, and skill dependent. What I will say about feats is that we start off being able to pick 2 of them, and we get to choose another at every even level. At level 16, we unlock feat specializations, where, at each level, we can add one point to an already chosen feats to make it more effective in some way. So for example, the expertise feat gives us an extra point of damage per level, adding a point in specialization will provide another extra point in damage per level. Good stuff Beyond that, there are also a few veteran feats, which become available when we hit level 26. There are also a few feats which we can only acquire outside of leveling, through our many actions, although not all of these are necessarily going to be beneficial however. Feats will be the key to developing our character to reach their utmost potential, and as such its generally important to tailor your primary stats and skills around the feats you wish to work towards. Here is a link to the handy dandy character builder if you would like to see what each feats is and what they do and if you'd like to know how each stat affects everything else. https://underrail.info/build/  -Skills- There are six different sub-categories of skill in this game; Offense, Defense, Subterfuge, Technology, Psi, and Social. Each skill can potentially synergise with other skills. Meaning, for example if you have a high skill in say, mechanics, then you get a few bonus points put into your lockpicking or traps. Offense Guns: This helps your effectiveness with Pistols, SMGs, Shotguns, Assault Rifles and Sniper Rifles, Update, also recently added to this list are grenade launchers.. The heavier the gun type the more of this you will need before you overcome an effectiveness penalty. Heavy Guns Update An Offense skill not yet seen in the above screen shot, this is due to it having been introduced in the Heavy Duty DLC which came out just over 11 months after this Let's Play began. It governs the players effectiveness with weapons of subtlety also known as the Minigun and Light Machine Guns. Throwing: Makes you good with hand grenades, throwing knifes, and other projectiles weapons and tools. This skill is always useful to have a little bit of, we're gonna be throwing things not matter what, and we don't want to lob grenades at our feet. Crossbows: Useful to use any crossbow in the game. Melee: Used to be more effective with unarmed, knives, swords, spears or sledgehammers. Defense Dodge: Helps you avoid incoming melee attacks. Evasion: Helps you avoid incoming ranged attacks. You can get away with not worrying about these two skills, on higher difficulties they don't scale fast enough to make a difference and on lower difficulties a good piece of armor and or not letting the enemy move in the first place will serve you far better. They might be worthwhile for melee tanks though, I dunno. Subterfuge Stealth: Makes you harder to detect whilst sneaking. You can honestly get a way with passively improving this skill with your equipment loadout instead of putting points into it, but it's not a bad idea to have some stealth ability for a lot of builds. Hacking: Required to successfully unlock electronic locks, is also useful when interacting with computers. Lockpicking: Required to successfully unlock conventional locks. Neither this skill nor hacking are in any way required to finish the game, they will provide you will a far wider selection of resources and alternative approaches to a lot of situations. Pickpocketing: A great way to save money. Good on oddity XP mode too. Not critical but certainly a more useful skill than it is in a lot of other games. Traps: Helps with detecting, disarming and deploying traps. Get really good at it and you can recover a trap wholesale. -Technology- Mechanics: Largely concerned with the crafting of conventional weapons. Worth having a little bit to help maintain your equipment more easily at the very least. Useful to jury rig old, broken down machinery. Electronics: Important to help make and maintain energy weapons, shielding devices, and any battery powered equipment. Also quite handy when interacting with computers and other electrical gadgets. Chemistry: Chiefly concerned with the making of explosives, and assisting in the making of drugs and chemical warfare. Really helps push a lot of suboptimal builds into a more viable framework. Biology: Helps you make medicines, combat drugs, poisons, and otherwise handy with the extraction of biological crafting components. Makes you more knowledgeable of all things living. Tailoring: Key to making your own armor and armor accessories. A great way to look smart as the bullets bounce off you. -Psi- Thought Control: Governs psi abilities that concern attacking the mind directly, instilling fear and doubt into your foes as you make their heads explode. Psychokinesis: Move objects with your mind, make psychic force barriers, or fill the air with electricity. Great for long range kung fu. Metathermics: Control entropy by setting fire to things with a thought, or freeze them solid and then shatter them into pieces. Temporal Manipulation: Manipulate space-time to truly gently caress up reality. Make your enemies slow to a crawl, while you move faster, jump to a later point in time to avoid damage, or warp causality itself to cause deadly temporal chain reactions. -Social- Persuasion: Convince people to do things with the power of dialogue trees. Intimidate: Convince people to do things with the power of violent dialogue trees. Mercantile: Make use of your carefully collected coupons to shave 10% off of the price of that large intestine you've been meaning to purchase. Can also give you access to some merchants private stashes. So with that all out of the way, we need a vote, probably one of few I will have in the making of this lp, but what kind of character should we be? To answer this I will ask people to suggest a gender, a single weapon type, a psi discipline if any at all, and a social skill. With regards to psi, we can always come back to it at a later date if we decide on none and change our mind. So XP Oddity, Classic? Gender M/F? Weapon: Unnarmed, Pistol, SMG, Shotgun, Assault rifle, Sniper rifle, knife, sword, spear, sledgehammer, crossbow? Psi: None, Thought Control, Pyschokinesis, Metathermics, Temporal Manipulation? Social: Persuasion, Intimidate, Mercantile? I'll attempt to cobble together a build based on these choices. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Jan 24, 2024 |
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Dec 14, 2022 18:44
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This is one of those games that you kind of have to really commit to a build or be a bit shafted, unless you play one of the more powerful ones that have a bit more leeway. I'll be watching this closely since there's probably a lot to learn here.
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Dec 14, 2022 20:56
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Koorisch posted:This is one of those games that you kind of have to really commit to a build or be a bit shafted, unless you play one of the more powerful ones that have a bit more leeway. I think this is true up to a point. Its certainly the case early on that you really want to hone your character in a certain way. But by mid game you'll be pretty set in your main approach and you'll have a lot more extra points to spend on whatever you want really. At least this is most certainly the case for the lower difficulty levels.
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Dec 14, 2022 21:50
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I am following this thread. I really like this game, it's one of my favourite cRPGs of last years and true eurojank, but I really hate how it is one of these games where it is really easy to waste several hours to find out your build sucks and there's nothing you can do about this. XP: Oddity mechanics is great Gender F Weapon: I've always had a soft spot for Sledgehammer build Psi: Metathermics Social: Intimidate Also pickpocketing seeing how it is one of few games where it is actually useful. Szarrukin fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Dec 14, 2022 |
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Dec 14, 2022 22:10
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-Oddity -F -Unarmed -None -Persuasion
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Dec 14, 2022 22:25
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Szarrukin posted:I am following this thread. I really like this game, it's one of my favourite cRPGs of last years and true eurojank, but I really hate how it is one of these games where it is really easy to waste several hours to find out your build sucks and there's nothing you can do about this. Shades of Deus Ex swimming skill.
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Dec 15, 2022 04:30
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This looks a lot like Fallout 1/2 to me and I remember spending hours as a kid thinking up and planning out builds. Here’s my gimmick idea: XP: Oddity Gender: M Weapon: Sledgehammer Psi: Temporal Manipulation Social: Mercantile Name: M.C.
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Dec 15, 2022 07:09
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Well this LP might fit me fine, I tried getting into this game several times but got annoyed by the low density of content in the map.
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Dec 15, 2022 09:56
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I remember endgame being extremely tedious, but appearently it got changed in later versions.
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Dec 15, 2022 10:24
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-Oddity -Whichever -unarmed -None -Merchentile I'm all for playing a thieving little poo poo (lockpicking required) because money goes a long way in this game.
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Dec 15, 2022 10:46
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Ill vote for guns to use energy weapons then I leave the rest to goons.
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Dec 15, 2022 12:14
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This seems an interesting LP to watch, I've heard of this game many times but I've never properly seen it in action. XP: Oddity Gender: F Weapon: Unarmed Psi: Temporal Manipulation Social: Persuasion
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Dec 15, 2022 13:06
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I shall give this another day, and then I will cobble together something based on the suggestions provided. Oddity XP will complicate things somewhat, as it makes the early game a little more challenging, but that's okay.
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Dec 16, 2022 21:17
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This is one of those games I got in a sale then never played. Definitely curious to check this LP to know what to do when I get around to it. XP Classic Gender Male Weapon: Unnarmed Psi: Pyschokinesis Social:Mercantile I call him Tetsuo.
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Dec 17, 2022 20:50
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Okay I will call the votes here. Chapter 0.5 - A PC is born The only toss up was between going no psi and temporal manipulation. I will just veto this choice and pick temporal manipulation. So let's go over the key choices we've picked in some small detail, I think we've ended up with some good synergies. No real contest for going Oddity XP, which should be perfectly fine. the main drawback with this approach lies in the early game. For a lot of play styles, to survive the end of the early game, you're going to want to hit about level 8 at the very least. This isn't so hard to do in classic mode, you just gain XP by killing anything in sight and using your various skills, so a long as you're proactive and thorough you'll do this no problem. For Oddity XP, we have to scrounge and explore for the finite amount of objects that are available. The problem comes from the fact that, some of the objects will be in locations that can only be found with a high enough perception skill, and some will require other stat checks, most notably agility, to reach. There are also oddities that will realistically require the pickpocket skill, and others that will appear as random enemy drops. Now this isn't a huge deal in the long term, the world is large enough and there's plenty of oddities, but in the early game we're locked out of most of the game world until we reach a particular story beat. A story beat that will be hard to reach if you aren't about level 8. It isn't impossible, but you can see how with a certain type of character build, on Oddity XP and with some unlucky enemy drops, you're going have a much rougher time of it. Thankfully, I don't think this character will run into those issues. We will be playing as a Woman, this won't have an enormous impact on the game, this game is largely sexless and this will just the influence the odd bit of dialogue, but there is at least one part of this game where this can have interesting consequences for us, potentially. Nothing we can't handle though. Next our main line of defense will be Unarmed, this is honestly the combat style I have the least experience with in this game. Although from what I can tell, it's a pretty popular, diverse and effective play style, so this should be interesting. Our psi skill is Temporal Manipulation. This is a good choice of psi skill, it's the newer of the four psi disciplines, as it was added into the game with the Expedition DLC. Of all the disciplines its the one which compliments the broadest range of build styles. If you get midway through the game and find your character lacking in effectiveness, add some Temporal Manipulation into the mix to spice things up. The reason for this is fairly obvious, this is a single character game with turn based combat, and Temporal Manipulation directly affects the action economy in a big way. Finally, we will be taking Mercantile as our social skill, this is a solid choice. It has the most practical applications of the social skills, since it can give us access to cheaper, higher quality items. We will probably get into more fights but whatever. What I like about the social skills in this game, notably persuasion, compared to a lot of CRPGs, is that while it can short cut us through a lot of violent situations, it doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes. If we want positive change in the world of Underrail, we're probably going to have to get our hands dirty. Really dirty. That wraps up my initial thoughts and comments. I will now head to the laboratory and hit the books, till I come up with a build that I'm happy heading forward with. See you all then. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Jan 7, 2023 |
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Dec 17, 2022 22:45
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Chapter 1 - Welcome to South Gate Station So interestingly, whilst doing research for this build, I learned that there is actually an important distinction between an unarmed build, where you use no weapon at all, and a "fist" build, where you wield combat gloves. An unarmed build seems to benefit the most from Pschokinetics, which we probably won't be using, so I've opted to go with the fist build instead. Just so no one thinks I'm a god at this game, whilst I was googling around for an unnarmed playstyle worth doing, I found the build I will be using which I attribute to TheRealSebu on Reddit. I have done some minor tweaking to the skills to suit my own personal preferences and am mostly guessing what equipment will be useful based on other research I've done. My initial test run successfully made it through the early game and at about level 10 too, so I've concluded that it is more than viable and is fun enough to finish the game with. Anyway, onto our protagonist, who I have named Henrietta.  The key stat with any fist build is dexterity. Given that its a light weapon, it will reduce the action cost of our attack the higher it is. We're going to be hitting a lot in one round. Our strength is little low, but we mostly want it to reach some feat requirments. It will help us hit harder, but we will be aiming to do a lot of criticals to do most of our damage. The high constitution is also to hit a few important feats, but the extra hitpoints and resistances will be most welcome. We are going to be stumbling into a lot of traps since our perception sucks so we want to be able to walk off all those landmines. Our very low agility and perception means we probably won't be finding a lot of secret areas and we can't climb into or over anything which will hurt us as an oddity xp haver. But not enough to slow us down. Our will being so low means we won't be a very good psionic, but that's okay, our psi powers will be there to mostly compliment our approach, so we don't need to be flinging psi abilities constantly. Our supplies of psi restoring drugs will be able to cope with our rate of use. Mind affecting psi against leveled against us are going to hurt however. We have above average intelligence to give us access to more active psi abilities, and to eventually provide us with a means to compensate for our poor will score. It will also give a boost to out technology skills which will help us make better things earlier. Our two level 1 feats we will go with are.   Survival Instincts is the reason we need 9 starting constitution. We're likely going to get hit for a lot and so this will help us from dying in the turn after. It can also just turn us into a bashed up glass cannon whenever we need it too. Recklessness, is of course just to keep our critical train chugging along. Combined with our will it's going to make us very vulnerable to psi attacks however, so we need to be the careful sort of reckless. So after all this, we're some kind of fast punching, hot-headed boxer, so basically, we're this guy.  The skill point distribution to start off with is: 5 Throwing 15 Melee 15 Stealth 15 Hacking 15 Lockpicking 5 Mechanics 10 Electronics 15 Chemistry 5 Biology 5 Tailoring 15 Temporal Manipulation A quick note on skills, you can max out a skill at 15 points for first level with that maximum increasing by 5 every subsequent level. It's a good idea to keep your primary weapon skill at max. We also want to keep improving our throwing for a little while, it's handy for almost any build you can come up with. We're going to want to get the drop on people and fist/unarmed weapons are completely silent too, so stealth is a good pick. Keeping our lockpicking and hacking high is good to access all the goodies we can find. We basically want a lot of all the technology skills, but to begin with I want to try and get Chemistry to 69 and Electronics to 20 as fast as possible without letting the other skills lag behind. Getting my Biology to 40 will also be a nice short term goal as well. It does mean we will have to wait on making our own weapons and armor, but that's okay, Tiocfaidh Ar La. Temporal Manipulation is maxed, this isn't super important right from the start, because we won't be able to make much use of it for a while yet. And I haven't sunk any points into Mercantile just yet, we will eventually but it won't help us much right away, but it is coming. That's that then, let's start the game already. UnderrailOST - Citystation We're introduced SGS' Ruling council, Hadrian Tanner, Gorsky, and Vera Hale; as they discuss the aftermath of a recent earthquake that has hit South Underrail.    Life is tough underground, and SGS is one of the safest places to be, and we've managed to prove ourselves capable enough to pass our citizenship tests.   If our persuasion skill were high enough, Vencel would tell us that we scored highly on a lot of our tests and that Tanner will be pleased.  I'll skip the tutorial, it's mostly just a small series of rooms where you're introduced to the basics of hacking/lockpicking/stealth, item usage, reloading weapons, and the like. Such mechanics can be talked about as we come across them or whenever, not in there we need to concern ourselves with.  We're finally in the game proper. Starting out in our very own sleeping quarters, nestled within the safety of South Gate Station. It's a little dark in here though, so let's turn on some lights.  That's better. This shows off the games lighting system, you can see the greyed out tiles, which are due to them lying outside our field of view. Tiles which lie outside our field of view won't update their light value if we haven't seen them after lighting an area, hence why that tile next to our bed is still dark. A neat feature of the character portraits in this game is that they react to the lighting your character currently occupies. So if you stand in the dark, your portait will be darker, stand in reddish light, your portait will be redder. It's neat. The portrait backgrounds will also change depending on the environment we occupy too. Anyway, our computer screen is flashing, so lets check out what's on it.  We've got two emails, one from a mechanic named Wayne, and one from Councillor Tanner.  We'll make out way down to the commons in just a moment. First lets grab our card.  We grab our key to the front door, which can use to both unlock and lock our sleeping quarters door if we so wish. We've also got a compass, which tells us which way is north, north is always towards the top righthand corner of the screen, so this item is pretty useless, we will leave it where it is. We also take the 200 SGS Credits, there a few different currencies in this game, SGS Credits are largely only used by SGS and they're pretty inflated too, so they aren't great value. But whatever, money doesn't weigh anything and we need it. We head on over to the lockers by the front door.  Inside we've got our two main methods of healing. Health hypos, which are your standard instant health item, good to use when things are getting rough in a fight, but make note of the fact that there is a cool down period between uses. A lot can happen in 6 turns, so don't rely on them. Bandanges are you secondary means of healing, your main way of keeping your health up when you aren't in a fight, they take a short time to heal you, and if you're a high hp individual, they may not heal you fully. Also as noted, they only work when your hp is above 40%, but they are handy to have around. Checking out the next locker reveals.  We've got a handful of flares, an item that in most of the RPGs which accommodates them, would be ignored or otherwise marked as trade fodder. In this game, flares are pretty handy to have around. If you find yourself entering combat and nothing seems to be on screen with you, throwing a flare into the area is a good way to reveal hidden foes. They have another use to, but we'll get to that. We've got ourselves some rathound leather armor, its not great but its light. The higher the armor penalty on a piece of armor the heavier it is, get it high enough and it will affect your mobility during combat. Note that the way to read armor resistance is a damage type will have m%/n next to it. This means it will resist m% of a certain damage type or a flat n damage whichever value is largest when you are hit. So this means if we are hit for 3 points of mechanical damage, we won't recieve any of it, otherwise if were hit for damage where 17% of that damage was greater than 3 damage, 17% of the damage is resisted. The key features of rathound leather is that it provides you with some added cold resistance, which isn't a particularly common form of damage in this game, and it smells awful so it gives us a penalty to our persuasion. We don't care about that penalty because our persuasion will always be bad anyway. We will put it on for now. We also find some of the two standard kinds of repair kits. Weapons and armor have durability in this game so we will want to keep them in good nick and kits will allow us to do that. You typically use mechanical repair kits on weapons and patching kits on armor. Although since we will be focusing on combat gloves. You can also find electronic repair kits, which are used to repair any weapons and armor that have an electrical component to them. There is also forth kind of repair kit, but we won't be seeing them for a long time, so I'll keep quiet for now. Every repair kit also has an Advanced variant too, which simply repairs more durability. Repair kits are handy to have, and we will be using a lot of them. Taking all of this stuff with us we head out of our sleeping quarters. The residential level is dark so we switch on a nearby light.   The other sleeping quarters are all electronically locked, and most of them can be hacked, although we don't have anywhere near enough hacking to break into them, nor do we have the equipment necessary to hack besides. Some of the door locks are too complex for hacking at any skill level and we will need keycards.  Breaking into the rooms is made more difficult by the nearby security cameras. Cameras in this game are a nuisance, they will slowly sweep an area and in friendly zones like this will turn everyone hostile if you are caught by them. So we not only need to be skilled enough to hack the doors, we need to hack fast too. All cameras in this game are some of the few entities that you cannot hide from by using stealth. When a hostile camera spots you, it will beep, turn orange, and then start to track you. After a few short seconds, if you haven't broken line of sight with it, it will beep more angrily and turn red. Any hostiles in the area will slowly start heading towards your current location. If you break line of sight with a camera, in either orange or red modes, it will eventually beep and go back to green. They can be destroyed, but doing so in friendly zones won't end well for you.  Not much more to see on this floor, except that there are communal showers down here, no toilets though. That must suck if you wake up in the middle of whatever constitutes nighttime down here and you need to go. We head towards the elevator.  We have a number of locations to choose from, but for the time being we'll head for the Commons and Cantina, to speak with Tanner.  We can see the nearby cantina just off to the side there. We'll make a quick stop in here and introduce ourselves.  By way of the cantina's kitchen, there's a supply door to get in that way, we close the door to the service counter so we can raid the pantry. There are a number of food items to be found in here, I won't go through them all in much detail. I don't particular care to use food items all that much personally, foods give you various small buffs to stats and skills depending on the meal and usually last for a good while. Minmaxers seem to love these things, I just keep forgetting I have them on me. We will swipe all of the food so we can sell it later.  We will grab only one of these cave hopper steaks for a quest later, since they don't sell for much. Heading into the cantina proper, by way of the front door, we run into Vencel relaxing.  We head up to the bar counter to chat.   You met Arlene during your testing period. She's in charge of food preparation and rationing. "Ha! We used to make fun of Tanner‘s stupidly high standards when admitting new people""Not the end of the world if we get someone imperfect, we said. And here you are, bringing us earthquakes on day one." "Very funny, Arlene" "I was only kidding don't take it too seriously. Anyway, what do you need?" "Who's that dandy over there?"We talking about the guy just standing bottom right of Arlene in the above picture. "Over there? That's Ethan Lanford" "What can you tell me about him?" "He's a... handsome man. heh Comes to SGS from time to time, always dressed as sharp as a razor. He's always flirting with the ladies — no exceptions I've seen him entertain quite a nunber of them - well, myself included - with some unusual psionic tricks." "Tricks?" "Well, he's a.. whatcha call it - a temporal manipulator. It's one of those psi abilities, disciplines. whatcha-call-it, but the thing he does I've never seen anyone else do before. He can manipulate time, but only for specific objects, like slowing down a fly so it moves its wings in slow motion, or making things hover in air, that sort of stuff." "It's all parlor tricks - fun and unusual, good to attract the ladies. His good looks and charisma makes them stick around, though. That's his real magic, mmm."Ethan's the guy that'll instruct us in the ways of our chosen psi profession when the time is right "Know anything else about him? Where he's from, what does he do?" "Not much. He's talkative but reveals little about himself, when you think about it. No one knows where he's from or what he does He usually comes alone, maybe leaves with a girl, maybe not. Depends. Always drinks fizzy water, yes. Has that Temporal Manipulation thing going for him." "And that's all I know, really. Oh yeah, dresses as sharp as— Oh, wait, I said that already." "Thank you. There was something else I wanted to ask you." "So how bad was it - the earthquake?" "For us, not that bad. The South Tunnel collapsed, so the train is out for a while. The station itself didn't suffer any major damage as far as I know." "I heard it's much worse up north. Something about a Union's freighter crashing and getting buried on a side rail near Core City. Girl, I can already imagine all the vermin crawling out of their holes to take a bite of that cake; and I‘m not talking about rathounds." "Heard any good rumors?" "Gorsky's gathering up his squad. Don't know what they're up to, but they're armed." "I heard Mordre's been acquiring some quality cigars lately. Wonder who's his supplier."We'll meet Mordre a little ways from now "No one knows who's the man that's been found in Mushroom Cove. Think Pasquale's still examining the body."Now this is an interesting rumor! There are two mutually exclusive quests in this game, when you start a new game you are randomly assigned one or the other. This rumor pertains to one of them, and its the one that has the most variation to it between multiple different playthroughs. "I guess Junkyard still hasn't gotten rid of Ol' Chopper. One more victim found in pieces." "Rumor has it that there are quite a number of people sitting outside United Stations embassy in Junkyard. Guess they've been feeding them good." "There's been very little pirate activity lately. The Black Eels seem to be doing a drat fine job." "Harland told me he's started seeing more and more Lurkers near the underpassages exit." "Apparently, the Free Drones are becoming more and more active in South Underrail. Some even say they have a hideout in Junkyard." "Captain Svana recently told me about another poor soul sailing to Silent Isle. Haven't seen him since."The rest of the rumors are just some world building fluff. We will be visiting these places and meeting these people in due time. Let's look at what Arlene has for sale.  So this is how trade works in this game, like in a lot of RPG's you can barter items for equivalently valued cash or items, assuming the vendor has enough of either. The bar at the bottom of the screen will tell you if your offer will be accepted or refused, as well as if you're getting ripped off or a good estimate for how much more you'll need to offer to let a deal go through. How trade differs largely from other RPGs is that traders will only accept certain kinds of goods and typically only a finite amount of them. Once you sell a person exactly what they want, you can't sell them anything else until a certain amount of real time has passed. This keeps from hauling every little bit of garbage around with you. Although it is a good idea to make some stashes near certain merchants, so you can make some cash when you need it. I like this trade system, I think it works pretty well. We sell off a few of our food stuffs to grab all the money she currently has on her.  "We head over to chat with this mysterious fellow in the corner"  "No, actually, I‘m new here." "Names Jack Quicksilver." "Where are you from, Jack?" "I'm not a citizen of any place if that‘s what you're asking. I travel around a lot, but when I‘m not on a train, I spend most of my time in Core City." "What brought you here in the first place?" "A lucrative business opportunity. But it slipped past me, unfortunately."We'll come back to Jack later on to talkt about this business deal of his. "What do you do for a living? Are you a trader?" "Among other things, yeah. Are you looking to trade?" "Show me what you got." Jack's inventory is items associated with infiltration and skulduggery. So he's got lockpicks, knives, crossbows and their ammo, assorted grenades, throwing knives, a multitool, some boots, a balavlava and different combat gloves. He also has Stygian coins on him, these are the most widely used currency in the game. It's valued far better than SGS credits. People typically call them Charons.  We pick up 7 lockpicks from him, which we need to pick locks. Lockpicking is simple in this game, every pickable lock has a lockpick rating, if our lockpick skill matches or exceeds that rating, a lockpick will open it. It's possible that you pick locks faster with higher lockpick skill or maybe the more difficult locks just take longer to pick I'm not sure. Successfully picking a lock will use up a pick, failing to pick a lock will not lose your pick. You can also find more advanced lockpicks, Jack has some MKII lockpicks in his inventory, these will give you a slight boost to your lockpicking skill. We also buy a balaclava from him, which gives us a boost to stealth, intimidation and our cold resistance. I only really care about the stealth boost.  He's also got a really nice set of starting rathound leather gloves. I soon discover that these are probably our best starting weapon and go back to Jack to buy them. He also sells metallic gloves as well, they hit harder, but they are much slower, lets hits means less crits, so we will stick with leather combat gloves as we find them. The rest of the canteen patrons don't have much to say, so we go introduce ourselves to Ethan Lanford.  We can tell Ethan is a DLC character because he has a lot more descriptive text and he'll be a lot more verbose than a lot of other characters.  In his hand - a glass of fizzy water. He puts it down and focuses on you, smiling warmly; his teeth are so white he almost looks like a living toothpaste ad. "May I help you?" "Are you Ethan Lanford?" "Yes, yes, I am Ethan." He smiles. "You are...?" "Henrietta, I've recently moved to the station.""Good. Good. Yes, I am the man you need. What can I do for you?" "Anything interesting going on?" "Not much. unfortunately. The cave—in has us all trapped in here. so, like a lot of the people. I'm waiting for the tracks to get cleared before I can move on. However, now that I gave such a lovely company, I suppose I wouldn't mind the workers getting some rest." He smiles. "So you're the traveling type." "Well.. there is a good reason why I travel a lot. You see... I am... a temporal manipulator. A psionic. Now, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but I am a bit of a, how shall I say, an expert in my field. We are a rare kind, us temporal manipulators, and there isn'tmany of us walking around. So if you happen to be a psionic looking for some... tutoring in the discipline of Temporal Manipulation - I am your man." He takes a sip of his water, his eyes firmly fixed on you. "What do you think of South Gate Station?" "I have been here before many times and will return again if time allows. There are places where more fun can be had - nothing tops Core City in that regard, at least not in South Underrail - but South Gate Station is a place which I find most relaxing. It is a safe, well-defended station with civilized citizens. And... good-looking, decent women."So yeah, it looks like Ethan will flirt with you if you play as a woman. "The earthquake sort of forced me to stay here, but I don't mind. Moreover, I'd rather be stuck here with you than at some lowlife-infested bar worrying whether someone is going to stab me in the back." "Where will you be going after the rocks have been cleared?" "I‘m thinking Core City. Probably Core City. But the life of a traveler is an unpredictable one."Core City is where we can find Ethan once we got out of the early game. "Why are you drinking fizzy water?" "Water is the best drink. The fizz simply makes it a bit more interesting." He smiles and put his hand above the half-full glass, palm facing down. Moments pass in silence - the bubbles are slowing down. Another second flies by - they have stopped, as if the water itself has become frozen and trapped the bubbles inside, yet when he shakes the glass, the water is moving freely around the incarcerated carbon dioxide. You wait, his hand still hovering over the glass The bubbles remain motionless at first, but then they begin to rise slowly in unison, accelerating until they reach their maximal speed. "Neat, huh?" "Are you a psionic?" "Yes I am In fact, I am a temporal manipulator, and what I used to keep the bubbles motionless was a variation of the ability called stasis. This is a simple trick, but the ability itself holds much more power than what I've demonstrated."We'll talk to Ethan in more detail once we actually awaken our inner psionic and have some experience under our belt. Wandering around the commons we find...  The stations toilets! Oh to live in a community that almost exclusively has pubic toilets!  We step into Tanners office to see whats up. We can also see that the stations has a few lecture/conference/entertainment rooms around here as well.   As soon as he finishes typing, he raises his head and readnes out to shake your hand. His big hand, tucked into dark-brown gloves, makes yours seem like that of a child in comparison, and you especially feel his large fingers to be twice as thick as yours.So Tanner is massive, he's a good bit taller than our character model. He's essentially our boss and will be giving us all of our main tasks to perform. He's seems kind and level headed and he'll pay us well too, albeit in SGS credits. His deep voice feels distant and calming when he addresses you. "Congratulations once again, Henrietta, and welcome to our small community. You scored very well on our tests, no small feat that. I'm sure you'll turn out to be a valuable and respected citizen and more importantly, I hope you'll find peace and kinship here, which are so hard to come by in the chaos surrounding us." "I have yet to get to know other Southgaters, but I have a good feeling I'll fit in with the rest of the crowd pretty well." He nods. "I believe so, too. People from many different backgrounds reside in this station. Whatever your interests may be, I'm sure you'll find someone who shares them here." "I hope the earthquake didn't disturb you much and you were able to rest a bit from all the testing, for you have much work to do today. Events have transpired that require your attention. Are you ready for some field work?" "How much damage did the earthquake cause?" "Not much damage to the station itself; there were no casualties fortunately. Regardless, the railroad tunnel has caved in so we're cut-off until the rubble has been cleared up. It is nothing that you should be concerning yourself with at this point in time. Now, backto the business at hand..." The rubble from the earthquake blocks us off from accessing most of the world, we won't be able to fully explore this game until that is dealt with. I consider the early game to be over, once the tunnels have been cleared. "First, you can have your weapon back Lucas at the armory should have it And while you‘re there, you might want to drop by the shooting range; since you'll be doing some field work today it might not be a bad idea to warm up in case things get ugly. Speak to Gorsky if he's there, he'll help you set up for some practice sessions. However, that is entirely up to you." "Understood. And What is this field work you mentioned?" "Down in the tunnels below our station, just to the north of Crossroad Caves lies a series of abandoned outposts. These outposts were built by another station a long while ago for the purpose of scouting and defense. In time they fell to decay." "I want you to retake then so that they mignt once again serve the same purpose. However, in order to do so, you will need to activate the main power generator that's located inside one of them. Harold from the engineering sector thinks he knows how to get the generator operational, so he should be your first stop after we are done here." "As far as I am aware, there are a total of five outposts plus the one with the generator. I don't know if it's possible to activate all of them, but try to activate at least three." "You may also want to talk to Jonas at the Crossroad Watch Post; it's down in the tunnels just outside the station you'll be passing through there anyway. He's one of our most experienced scavengers and he's probably seen more of South Underrail than any of us here. He'll surely have some useful advice for you." "Why are we retaking these outposts?" "It is an important strategic position should certain factions attenpt to encroach further into our zone of control. Besides, cleaning then out will also push some of the unwanted wildlife further away from SGS, so it is also beneficial in that regard." "Wildlife?" "I understand that a few packs of rathounds moved into the area, but you best talk to Jonas regarding that - he'll have more details. He knows that area inside—out." "Alright. I'll be off." "Oh, and one more thing before you go: Pasquale, our statiorn's chief physician, wanted to see you, so you should probably pop down to his office in the medical sector when you have the tinne." "Got it. See you later." So we've got our first assignment but before we get on with that, we'll go around introducing ourselves to a few people around the station first.  We head down to the Library and Administration floor  There's not much down here besides some archival equipment and some locked doors we'll probably never be able to access without getting everyone mad at us. We will go meet up with Councellor Vera Hale in her office.  "What can you tell me about Core City?" "It's a city to the north that spans both levels of Underrail. It serves as a gateway to both the Upper Underrail and to the United Stations territories to the north." "The city used to be controlled by the Biocorp's security forces, but they went rogue and split into smaller factions. This was followed by a couple of years of street wars between these factions."Biocorp was a biotech conglomerate and one of the six supercorporations that operated in opposition to nation states prior to the surface becoming uninhabitable several hundred years ago. They were also the original founders of Underrail. "The fighting ceased eventually in light of outside threats and serious infrastructural problems and nowadays the three surviving factions rule the city together through their appointed mayors." "Can you tell me a bit about United Stations?" "Certainly, United Stations, also called Union by some, is a confederacy of stations in north and central Underrail. It's an attempt to Unify the entirety of Underrail so that we could all work together towards a better future for the human race." "The Underrail Protectorate is a military organization that protects the United Stations from external and internal threats. It predates the Union itself and it also played a crucial role in its creation." "The Protectorate is under the command of General Melek, who is widely considered tobe the most powerful man in Underrail. He holds a special place on the United Stations' Council of Five, and some also believe him to be de facto ruler of it." The Protectorate is one of major factions we will get to interact with in the future. "Are there plans for SGS to join the United Stations at some point?" "Our citizens, and our councilors, are divided on that matter." "We currently have good trading relations with the union and I personally think it would be a good idea to be among the first to join it here in the south. We are arguably the most powerful faction in these parts so we could position ourselves advantageously in their organization and also retain a high degree of independence." "This would also ensure we avoid any potential military conflict in the future should the Protectorate decide to move against some of the, less-civilized communities in the neighborhood." "But as I said, not everyone agrees with me here. You must understand that many of our current citizens come from, organizations that have, for various reasons, been Protectorate's targets in the past, so they are not very keen on being buddies with their old enemies."She's referring to Gorsky here. Gorsky HATES the Protectorate and has no interest in SGS having any positive relations with them. "But let me ask you what is your opinion on the matter? Would you like to see yourstation become a member of the United Stations?" "I‘m not sure. I'm reserving judgment until I learn more about all this."I will leave it up to the thread if we ever decide to work with the Protectorate or not, but this is ways off yet. "You are a wise woman I hope that, like me, your future dealings with the UnitedStations will encourage you to support their efforts." "See you later."Now that that's over with, we head on over to the Armory floor to get ourselves equipped.  We've technically been here before, this was the floor where our training with Vencel took place. We step on over to the firing range to say hi to Gorsky.   "So you passed all of Tanners little tests and exercises. That could not have been easy, but don't think you're some kind of a hotshot now. You are yet to deserve the privilege you've been given."Gorsky's a gruff old bastard. If you disrespect him in this conversation he immediately punches you in the face and knocks you on your rear end. He grew up poor and has had a rough life even for an Underrailer. He is fine making hard choices, doesn't have time to hold our hand and he really HATES the Protectorate. "I understand." He nods. "So why are you here?" "Nothing."If we wanted to we could ask him how to do some target practice here, but since we don't use guns, this is pointless. It's also pretty pointless even if we did use guns, plus we don't get a lot of ammo to waste on target shooting at this stage.  We mosey on over to Lucas, the stations armorer.  "Yeah I like it here so far." "Well, friend - make yourself at home." "Can I have my weapon back?" "Of course. It was the, Uh... yeah, fivemil pistol and some ammo, if I recall correctly, Right? This one?" He produces a pistol that is in such bad condition people would pay to get rid of it.At this point we have a number of persuasion options to ask for a different weapon, if you're okay at persuasion you can talk him into giving you a machete, or a .44 Hammerer pistol instead. If you're REALLY good at persuasion at this point, you can say you had a shotgun. Shotguns were added in the DLC and this option was here before it, and would obviously just fail. We can also tell him gun are for wusses and we only need a knife, which requires no persuasion, or we can say we had a 5mm but not the one he handed to us. We don't want any of these options, but we'll take the gun, because we can sell it and the ammo straight back to him. "It was a five-mil pistol, but not that one." "Then whose? OH This has got to be Newton‘s gun. Heh, my bad. Here you go." He hands you your weapon.Let's take a look at Newtons inventory  Weapon merchants have a lot of stuff, way too much to cover. But the key thing is that they generally by a few guns, melee weapons and the odd bit of armor. They always buy any ammo and spent ammo casings off of you. So ammo is always good to carry back with you as extra currency. You can ignore picking up casings though, while you can always sell them, they don't actually sell for anything. If you were using guns, you'd want to hang on to any spent casings of the ammo types that you use, because you can recraft them back into more ammo when you have enough of them and the appropriate skill.  Lucas also sells a good few useful blueprints, which we will need for crafting, but we will hold off on buying them until we are little more comfortable financially. For now we buy some grenades, these will come in handy until we can make our own. Never leave home without a few grenades. If you went guns it'd also be wise to grab some extra ammo too, you're burn through a lot of it early one, when you can't kill things very good. This is where I noticed that Jack had the better gloves and went back to buy them. I think this is a good place to stop for now, we still have a few other faces to meet before we head off to do help out the station. So I will see you all then. Oh and I hope you all have a Merry Christmas! Zeniel fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jan 7, 2023 |
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Dec 24, 2022 15:31
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This feels very Fallout-y so far, which I'd rate as a good thing, stop tempting me to add more games to my Steam backlog...
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Dec 24, 2022 17:12
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Guessing you'll sell the gun to someone who buys them.
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Dec 24, 2022 17:15
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PurpleXVI posted:This feels very Fallout-y so far, which I'd rate as a good thing, stop tempting me to add more games to my Steam backlog... This game is a complete love letter to the original Fallouts. The main plot even touches on a number of similar story beats.
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Dec 24, 2022 17:26
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Happy holidays 
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Dec 24, 2022 17:41
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Zeniel posted:
That's a pretty wide grate, if you know what I mean 
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Dec 24, 2022 22:14
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I love how game not only discourages loot hoarding, it also has NPC that is parody of typical RPG junk selling protagonist and you can ask about him in local shops and the answer is always "gently caress this guy, he tried to sell me 15 bear asses yesterday, what I am supposed to do with this poo poo?
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Dec 25, 2022 00:15
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Chapter 2 - Day to day operations We take the elevator down to the medical and psionics floor.   The place has a nice gym, where psychokineticists train  The first aid cabinet here always has some extra healing supplies to nab.  Here we find SGS' only serious casualty from the earthquakes. He's alive but took a rock to the head, so ouch. Let's go meet Pasquale, he's got a LOT to say to us.   "It‘s good that you came. I actually wanted to talk to you about some of the results from all those tests we did earlier." "Is there something wrong with me?" "No, no. quite the contrary. Sorry if I scared you. You see, test results show that you have certain amounts of psionic potential." "I'm not derailed." "I'm not saying you are. It's not a bad thing. On the contrary, it's a great gift to inherit. And it won't make you- I mean, it doesn't have to turn you insane." "Allow me to explain what psionic potential really is. It's a relatively rare inheritable, complex genetic trait that triggers development of certain, otherwise latent components in the brain." "It allows a person to perform some subtle psionic invocations, such as influencing the minds of others, as well as some not so subtle ones - such as causing radical temperature changes and telekinetic manipulations." "How did this genetic trait come to be?" "No one is really sure. Research indicates that it's a relatively recent genetic mutation, but it sure could not have been a random one. So many things about it are just too complex and convenient to be anything but artificially designed." "There are problems with this hypothesis, though Former Biocorp's head of genetic research, Dr. Hal Roche, outlined these problems best in his thesis, I won't bore you with details, but the essence of the problem is that, with the technology that we currently have at our disposal, creating, testing and integrating genetic structures of such complexity is simply not possible without a colossal amount of trial and error work." "So much trial and error work, Roche argued, that even if you combined all the genetic processors in the world in his time and let them work on the project for the entire time of their existence, they would still be extremely unlikely to produce these results." "Furthermore, Roche points out that the structures of the brain where innervation that allows psionic activity takes place were never studied in such depth. Even though we know plenty about how the brain as a whole works, there is a large gap between the top down research - performed by psychologists and neurologists - and bottom—up research - done by neuroscientists studying neurons and receptors." "Inside this gap lie psionics, but due to the brain's nature and complexity, those who wish to study it need to start from either of these directions and slowly approach the middle." "So you see, it's a bit of a mystery. We know much more about how to make it work than how it actually works."So in short, psionic ability is caused by an almost certainly deliberate altering in some recent generations gene sequence. But nobody alive would have had the knowledge or equipment to have realistically performed such a task. So that is suspiciously interesting. "Interesting"My thoughts exactly. "Indeed it is. Is there something else you wanted to know?" "So how do I realize this potential?" "You must first disable your psionic inhibitor. It's a neural structure in your brain that prevents you from innervating - or accessing - your psionic projection centers. We assume it was designed to prevent the infants from unwittingly harming themselves or those around them." "There are ways to perform this innervation by deep, extended meditation, but this can take years and years. We have more efficient methods nowadays." He reaches into his pocket. Then, opens his hand before you. You see a large red pill. "It'll take care of the inhibitor right away, but there is one side effect I am obliged to mention. The majority of users experience immediate and significant weakening of their immune system, and when I say majority, I mean everyone. To put it bluntly — it will severely affect your health." "Therefore, the choice is yours."What this means mechanically is we will receive a new feat called Psi Empathy  This is the only way in the game to learn any psi abilities and psi related feats. So you will have to lose a decent chunk of your health. Thankfully our constitution is still pretty high so it's not a bad trade off, but it's still going to hurt. "Is the process dangerous? Painful?" "No, no... not at all- Well, maybe a bit dangerous for some, but it doesn't hurt at all- much. You might get a bit woozy but that's it." "Do I need to prepare somehow?" "No, just go ahead and swallow it." Take the pill and swallow it.This is going to make us hate women isn't it? You force the oversized pill down, and for a while nothing happens. "I don't think it's working." "Ah good, you're awake. How are you feeling?" "Ugh, my head hurts... What happened?"We wake up in the next room.  "While you were out I took the liberty of performing some more testing to determine the actual levels of your psionic potential. And, well... the inherent potential is there, but you'll have to train your mind hard before you can really make use of it."I think this line changes depending on how high your will and intelligence stat is or possibly how many psi points you put into your psi skills. At any rate Pasquale is probably saying we are gonna suck at psi. But we'll be fine, we're won't be using psi as our primary means of attack. Normally, I'd recommend not taking this until you are decent enough at psionics to offset the health cost. I've decided to just take it anyway at this point, mostly to get used to the lower health pool we will have. "Also, take these." He hands you a pair of syringes filled with blue liquid. "These psi boosters will help increase your psionic recovery rate basically, they'll allow you to use more psi abilities within a certain period of time than you normally could. They're fairly cheap, work fast, have no major side effects and are equally useful to beginners and experienced psionics alike." "There isn't a reason not to have a couple when you're going out there" And then he hands you four unusual inhalers. "And these contain desaturated psionic inhalants. They'll replenish your psionic reserves, and also help neurohormnonal regulation, and alleviate synaptic fatigue - especially after extensive innervation." "Just like muscles recover from fatigue with the help of the body‘s glycogen reserves, so does your mind have its own finite psionic equivalent."These two items are the ways in which you recover psi points. The way psi works is you have a psi bar, which consists of the points you can use to cast any psi ability. Each psi ability cost a certain amount of points, if you psi bar is empty you can't cast any more psi abilities. Standard stuff. However you also have a psi pool, which is a larger bar of psi, these are your psi reserves. If you expend any of your psi bar, your psi points are replenished by taking points from your psi pool. The amount it takes depends on your Intelligence and Will. Outside of combat this will happen each second intead. You can use psi boosters to give yourself an instantaneous burst of psi points pulled from the pool. If your pool is completely empty you can still use booster to replenish your psi bar but they are 50% less effective. Psi inhalents, are only used outside of combat and will completely restore you psi bar and psi pool. Like bandages, they don't work instantly so best make sure you're not about to be attacked before using. They are also the only way to recover psi taken out of the pool too, so make sure you always have a few on hand. They aren't cheap either so use sparingly. Inhalents are actually a late addition to this game, originally, your psi bar would just slowly regenerate every turn, and you use boosters to recover psi quickly during a fight. This, means you essentially had a skill, unlike any other means in this game, that was infinitely useable with no serious drawback. As you might imagine this made psi build insanely overpowered. As you didn't need ammo or have to worry about equipment degrading in any major way. Psi is a lot better balanced now, as you can easily over extend yourself as a psi mage and end up in a large fight after burning you psi pool to empty and having no means of recovery. "Where can I get more psi boosters and inhalants?" "Most doctors offices should have then in supply, mine included. I can sell you some if you'd like." [Persuade] "Only a pair of boosters?" "Uh, what do you mean by "only" a pair? That's quite sufficient to get you started." "I‘ve got a lot of dangerous work ahead of me, doc, and considering I've yet to become an experienced psionic. I'd rather not find myself short on brain juice when I need it the most." "Just use then wisely and you should be alright. Or you could simply purchase more. They're cheap, but not cheap enough for me to be giving then away just like that."If our persuade had been anything, we would have gotten a second booster, but boosters aren't that hard to come by, and we won't be using them for a while anyway. "So how do I start learning psionic abilities?" "You'll have to talk to those already adept at it and see if they'll teach you. We have two very good specialists in our station." "Quinton is well versed in Metathermics, which is the area of psionic development that deals with instigating rapid temperature changes and chemical reactions. He used to be one of Biocorp's researchers working on new applications of psionics." "You'll find him on the agronomy level." "Bisson is our martial arts expert. He can teach you psychokinetics and how to effectively use it in unarmed combat if that's something you're interested in." "He's usually in the gymnasium across the hall, but I think he's helping with clearing up the tunnels right now. so you'll likely find him at the station platform." "Thought control discipline is considered by many to be nefarious and it's also the hardest to get really good at. I‘m not sure who here can teach you it." "I heard rumors that Ezra, the chief of engineering, is actually a powerful mind controller, but I don't know if that's true. Most people here, including me, know nothing about Ezra so it might just be that some of then are making this stuff up."Ezra is indeed the thought control trainer. "And then there is Temporal Manipulation, which purportedly allows one to control time itself. I've never seen it in action. It's a discipline few practice. However, I've heard that a man that goes by the name of- what was it... Ethan L— Lanford... yes. Ethan Lanford: I've heard that he is a practitioner of the discipline. He's not from around here, but he does visit SGS from time to time. In fact, I just saw him in the bar moments ago." "I'm sure Arlene knows more about him. Ask her if you're interested." "Anyway, I have to get back to work now. Do you have any more questions?" "You keep mentioning the word "innervation" What does it mean exactly?" "The word itself can mean several things to supply with nerves, to stimulate, or to provide nerves with energy. In the context of psionics, in order for psionic invocation to take place, the brain's neural circuit needs to be suited for that specific invocation, fine-tuned even if maximum efficacy is desired." "Innervation is, thus, the training of the nervous system through stimulation of neural pathways - and focus. It is a taxing but necessary process for anybody who wishes to learn or relearn psionic abilities. Also, certain individuals naturally exhibit increased neurogenesis - creation of new neurons, giving them greater neural capacity, while those with strong dedication can also work to improve themselves in this regard." "One other thing I have to mention is that, just like sprinting and long-tunnel running require different training regimes and body types, so does the neural circuit require different neural infrastructures for different psionic disciplines. Optimizing for one set of abilities will de-optimize for the other, so majority of psionics, especially less experienced ones, stay away from multidisciplinarity due to the increased strain it puts on their mind — and sometimes sanity."What innervation means mechanically is this, we can learn any psi ability as long we meet the abilities minimum skill requirements and we find a trainer or some alternative means of learning the skill, but that doesn't mean we can just cast whatever. Your brain can only accommodate, at most 8 different psi abilities, although for Henrietta it'll be more like 6, as the exact number depends on our intelligence stat.  Our first 6 psi abilities will just go straight into our brain, any more and we will have to swap them in. However after choosing the 6 psi abilities we want to use, you have to "Innervate" your brain to start using them, which basically means your psi bar and pool are drained to 0. So you need to huff some psi inhalant every time you want to pick and mix a new set of psi skills. On top of this, if you have psi abilities from different disciplines locked into your brain, they start to cost more psi to use. The more disciplines, the worse the cost penalties will be. You can learn feats that will let you offset these costs but really you want to avoid being too broad in your psi skills. Or at least having access to a broad range of disciplines all at once. Got all that? Good. "Who's the dead man in the operating room?" "A guard found him dying in Mushroom Cove. Identity is still unknown. Probably some scavenger, but he had very few items on him when he was found." "What happened to him?" "Electrocution. No one knows what exactly transpired, but he was dead on arrival."Pasquale's response to this can change a lot, as the layout and enemies that lead to this characters demise can change dramatically every time you get this quest. "Can I see the body?" "What for?" "I have my reasons."If we had chosen the Doctor feat at the start of the game or had a higher Biology skill, we could have used that as a justifications too. Just nice incidental dialogue. "Well.." "I suppose... I suppose I can allow it. Just don't touch the body, okay?" "Can I talk to the guard who found him?" "I don't know which of the guards brought him in Malcom, the security officer can help you with that." "He's at the cave exit, on the lowest level of the station." Always get permission from Pasquale before inspecting the body, or it's an unlawful action.  His body shows signs of electrocution namely burn marks stretching between the limbs and the face, haloed in large hematomas in several spots along the way. Three distinct areas of the body have suffered the most damage: The first area is the feet - each sole has a single burned hole in the middle, the second is the knees - as if the man has, hypothetically, dropped to them after the first strike and suffered another, and lastly, the hands - which are charred and missing several fingers. [Chemistry] Additionally, the body reeks of rotten hopper eggs and ammonia - essentially sewage. Looking at the muck on the deceased clothes confirms that this person has indeed ventured into some rather foul place or places. Unfortunately, that's everything you're able to determine from inspecting the body. There are a number of different skills and stats that could help us learn more about the what happened to the body, the one the really leads to anything interesting is a high perception would tell us that the body was wearing a ring at some point. But otherwise, we will learn more about who this is at a later date. We can still bring our findings to Pasquale however.  "Is there a sewer entrance nearby?" "Let me think..." "The only sewage system I'm aware of is the one belonging to SGS, and it all goes out into the Chancer's Bay." "But the truth is that there are plenty of old Biocorp buildings and facilities around some ruined - some merely buried under tons of rock, waiting for a determined spelunker or a powerful earthquake to reveal then, so it's impossible to tell what's nearby."Oh well, nothing terribly interesting to note at this point. Let's head up to rail platform to see the extent of the earthquake damage.  Music - Lower Underrail Here we bump into one of the stations residents.  "Essie!" She laughs. "Yes, that's my name. How's it going?" "Good." "Well, you've been admitted to the station, so I reckon it can't be bad, right? Right?" "So, you need some help? Directions, to be a bit more specific?" "No thanks. I'll manage."We're currently in Lower Underrail, and Essie can give us some small directions to any place if we need to know how to go there. But we've nowhere to be here just yet. "Take care. And watch out once you're past the perimeter, there are a lot of dangers lurking about." Just past Essie, we have some stairs heading downward into the Service Tunnels. Music - Tensecaves  The tunnels are dark and ominous. With flickering, buzzing, fluorescent lights.  There's a bunch of shelves about this place, but they're all mostly empty. We head up to the stairs to reach the other side of the rail lines.  There isn't all that much over this side of the platform, but if we head south along the platform...   We can find an old phone box, these were added into underrail relatively recently.[ /i]  Typically, these phones feature an interface which has six distinct buttons, each with a unique icon on them. The phone uses a coil cord, and the headphone itself has no additional features other than a speaker and a receiver. Lastly, an exposed digital display port lies right beneath a small metal door, both located under said buttons. The connectors pins are bulky but few in number. There's nothing that indicates the current functionality of this phone. You can make a call. Press the button with a blue question mark icon.A robotic prerecorded voice speaks up: "Biocorp Metro Services offer the most reliable and safest transportation services. To ensure that promise, in rare circumstances and or events that would tamper with the experience of our passengers Bio—bzzt, services provide additional solutions to expunge any and every problem. Press the button with a red cross symbol to invoke a call for medical treatment of endangered passengers. Press the button with a red rathound symbol to invoke a call for situations where natural wildlife is impairing the traversability of the nearby trains. Press the button with a green shield symbol for situations where human interference is in any way tarnishing the experience of your traveling experience. The call suddenly stops. ======================== The other buttons we won't bother to push, at this phone, none of them do anything. Although each one does produce a unique tone. Curious... At any rate, there was also a small compartment on the phone box that had a few goodies inside.  We find a decent quality piece of black cloth. This can be used in a number of recipes to make things more stealthy. The amount of stealth it gives depends on the quality rating. 43, is pretty good for this point in the game, we will hang onto it. We also found some 12.7mm casings, 12.7mm ammo would be used exclusively for sniper rifles I believe. The casings are useless to us, so we'll just get rid of them. We'll head back down into the tunnels.   And we'll head north.  These are the defense turrets that Gorsky set up to defend the station against interlopers who creep about the service tunnels  Here we also find a bunch more pretty bare shelves, although in one playthrough I did find a shotgun and bunch of ammo, which all sold for a pretty penny. In this case I found some 8.6mm rounds, my ammo of choice for a good assault rifle build I came up with. Anyway, who's this mysterious fellow hanging out down here?  "Heya. I'm Henrietta." "I'm Harland. What are you doing down here?" "I need to get into the tunnels" "I'm not opening the gates. unless it's an emergency. Gorskys orders." "Why not?" "It's a Lurker metropolis out there, and I'm here on my own guarding it because everyone else is working or guarding the metro tunnel upstairs." "So unless Gorsky or Tanner come down in person to tell me otherwise, this gate is staying closed." "Where do the tunnels lead?" "Freaking everywhere!" "Back when the underrail was built they used them as escape routes in case there was a hazard in one of the main tunnels, or just to be able to quickly access remote parts of the Lower Underrail."Harland's not exaggerating, you can reach many different places in Lower Underail much faster if you take the service tunnels. If you can handle the danger that is. "Nowadays, between Lurkers and dangerous creatures that skitter about, it's not the safest way to travel around." "If you absolutely must go there, best bring night vision goggles, or at least some flares."If we hadn't gotten the Mushroom cove scavenger quest, we'd get a quest from Harland instead. This would involve investigating a smashed camera, that would lead us to walking with a guide robot through a pitch black tunnel system, full of Lurkers and ultimately find a kidnapped group of people we could rescue. "What can you tell me about these Lurkers?" "You don't want to meet those guys, let me tell you that. They're a brutal, cannibalistic gang that lives in these under passages and are the primary reason why only the most desperate would use them." "I see them on the cameras sometimes, and at one time three of them even tried breaking through the gate. Had they managed it, though, they'd have met that turret over there. But seriously now, Lurkers are no joke. I heard stories of then stealing babies and children from smaller settlements and, horrible stuff, man. Horrible stuff."There are a handful of different gangs we will have to deal with in this game, and the Lurkers are our first. Each gang has its own special brand of bullshit we will need to deal with. Lurkers, are the stealthy, ambush, kind of bullshit. None of these gangs can be negotiated with, they will kill on sight, so we will be sure to return the courtesy. "I was just leaving."We head back up to the main platform and head north.   We've arrived at the northern border of SGS in Lower Underrail. We will head inside the security office and say hi.   "Wish I had time to chat, but I'm quite busy right now." "Have you made any progress clearing the tunnel?" "Not much so far. We have to dig deep enough to safely plant the explosives, otherwise we risk damaging the tunnel even more." "How much damage did the earthquake do?" "We're not sure. It might be that the tunnel just caved in a couple of places. I've sent parties to the tunnel's side entrances to investigate. We'll know more when they return."That's probably all we'll see of Roman, there is quest later on in the game that he can participate in but I'm not sure we'll be able to bring him into it, we shall see. "I‘ll leave you to your work." Just over the fence, we find a team of workers smashing away at the rubble on the tracks. The psychokinetics instructor Bisson, is assisting them by hitting the rocks with his telekinetic punch attacks.   "I'd love to chat, but as you can see we're all a bit too busy right now. Is there something you need?" "What are you doing?" "I'm helping with clearing up the tunnel by using telekinetic manipulation."We don't really have all that much to say to Bisson, we could talk to him at length about the skills he would teach us, but nothing terribly important. "I have to go."That's all there is to do up top for the time being, so instead we head down to the engineering and cyber labs.   Just inside the workshop there's a locker with a guaranteed Supercharged Lithium Cell battery inside of it. It's technically stealing, but it's within the blindspot of the engineers and the camera isn't looking this way, so we grab it. Then we introduce ourselves to Harold.  "Nice to meet you, Harold. I'm Henrietta." "So... you looking for something specific or just looking around?" "Tanner tells me you know of a way to restore power to the outposts to the north." "He nods. Right, I remember taking a look at the power generator there a while back. I couldn't do anything about it back then because I didn't have this." He rummages through the boxes that are on the table before procuring something resembling an energy core. "Here. It's a flux controller. If you insert it into the slot at the front of the power generator, it should get it running again." "After that you ought to be able to reactivate all the outposts. I'm afraid you'll have to do that manually, though. You see, each of them has a switch that cuts off the power in case of a hazard."The number of times I have accidentally forgotten to go pick up this item, not today though! "Do you have any stuff to trade?" Harold's an engineer so he mostly sells blueprints for crafting and various bits of raw material, most of it pretty poor quality. But sometimes we don't care about quality. We'll be back for some of his blueprints at a later date, for now we just pick up a few more batteries. We will need them to keep our electronic good nice and charged.  The workshop also has a hidden lounge room where the engineers all slack off and watch South Underrail's favorite pastime, the Core City Arena! A blood sport, where contestants pit themselves against either swarms of captures creatures or go toe-to-toe with the arena's gladiators for fame and fortune. The losers are killed horribly. DOMINATING!  I also find a dirty rag! This is useful so we grab it.  We head into the cyberlabs, where the computer touchers are hard at work, dekerneling the deprecated linux fragments, or whatever.  At the end of the lab, we find Ezra, the head of Engineering.   He speaks with a calm and even voice. "Hello, Henrietta. I am Ezra. I act as the head network administrator and chief of the entire engineering sector." "Are you blind, Ezra?" Ezra raises his hand slowly and extends it towards you. He holds two of his fingers in front of your face for a moment, each pointing at one of your eyes, before retracting the hand.Ezra's a strange man. "What is it exactly that you do here?" "Me specifically, the cyber department, or the engineering sector?" "I meant you" "I make sure that all parts of the station's internal network are communicating properly and securely and that all the scripts are running as they should." "I also oversee all operations of the engineering sector." "What does the engineering sector do in general?" "We construct, deconstruct, research, upgrade. Listing all the specific things we do would take too much of my time. Go around and talk to people working here. They might be willing to let you know the details of their projects." "How about the cyber department?" "We maintain and improve the station's internal network. We write programs for all automated systems in the station." "I hear you are a powerful mind controller. Is this true?" He just keeps staring at you.At this point, we could keep staring back at Ezra and we would enter a battle to try and control each other minds, we would absolutely lose, no matter how powerful a psionic we were, but he would teach us some thought control abilities. Oh and just so you know, Ezra has 18 will! He is a very powerful psionic, and there's more to him than meets the eye. He is dangerous.  Anyway the reason we're talking with him at all is to pick up a Haxxor from him. This is the equipment we need to hack electronic locks. It's also why we picked up some batteries and it needs to be charged to function. We can also see that Ezra is the stations, electronics dealer, lots of stuff related to making energy weapons, energy traps & explosives, as well as various optical enhancers and stuff to make us a better psionic. Critically he sells a blueprint that will allow us to make a Taser, once we hit 20 Electronics. We will definitely want this. Next time we will finish up exploring the rest of SGS and finally make our way into the lower caves to secure the outposts. See you all then. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jan 7, 2023 |
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Dec 26, 2022 10:28
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Yikes, all the text in this game is pretty hard to read, untranscribed
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Dec 26, 2022 11:47
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switching the screenshot format to PNG may improve that.
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Dec 26, 2022 12:27
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The description surrounding the conception of psionic powers makes me wonder if it's gonna turn out that aliens are responsible for unlocking them in humanity.
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Dec 26, 2022 13:01
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They're underground, so my bet is ancient lizard people
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Dec 26, 2022 14:17
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Synthbuttrange posted:Yikes, all the text in this game is pretty hard to read, untranscribed Apologies for that, it's been a while since I've made an lp so I had to relearn a few things and by the time I learned a better way of doing things I'd already gotten a bunch of footage. But cleaner text should be available in the episode after next. The game font is not love by any image to text program I've used either and requires far too much editing to make it legible but I'm working on that too. I'm going to boost the font size for my next lot of recording, the game options allows you to do that, so it should be clearer in any event.
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Dec 26, 2022 14:22
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Zeniel posted:
I haven't replayed the game with the big psi update, so this is pretty neat.
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Dec 26, 2022 15:00
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itry posted:I haven't replayed the game with the big psi update, so this is pretty neat. What's fun is that if you continued to play a game that was made before the psi update , your character would have a unique feat called Forceful Innervation.  You had to remove the feat by using something called a Psycho-Neural Reconstructive Agent. 
Zeniel fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Dec 26, 2022 |
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Dec 26, 2022 15:30
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The art style between our character and most of the others seems to be different. I like both art styles, but they do seem distinct.
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Dec 28, 2022 05:06
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marshmallow creep posted:The art style between our character and most of the others seems to be different. I like both art styles, but they do seem distinct. I could be wrong, but I believe the character portrait I'm using comes from the DLC. All of the character portraits in this game belong to NPC's we can meet. Although some NPCs have unique portraits, like Tanner and Ezra for example. I took all of the conversation portraits I'm using directly from the Underrail wiki, whereas I took Henrietta's by screenshot, which explains the border, background, and lower res quality of it. I guess we'll find out eventually who her portrait belongs to eventually.
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Dec 28, 2022 09:52
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Chapter 3 - Some useful advice Where we last left off we were heading down to the Agronomy level.  We make our way to the dissection labs to say hello to Quinton.    He returns to cutting through the creature as he talks to you. "My name is Quinton. Don't bother introducing yourself, I know who you are. You're Henrietta, and you just got admitted to the station." "I'd shake your hand, but you can see why that wouldn't be a good idea." "What kind of creature is that?" "It's a burrower. It's one nasty creature that digs around, laying eggs all over the place. They are more numerous deeper underground, but you can still find a few roaming the Lower Underrail and the surrounding caves." "If you meet one, be careful. It will spit thick hard spines at you that are coated with poison."Yeah we are not in a hurry to meet a live burrower any time soon. "What are you doing exactly?" "I'm collecting its poison glands. We can use those to produce other chemicals or to coat crossbow bolts."Coating things in poison is a great way to put a bit of extra hell into your attacks, you can also poison traps and throwing knives too. Plus poisons come in a variety of flavors depending on where you source them. "What's in that room over there?" "We're growing mushrooms of different kinds there, of course, most notably the mindshrooms. They are one of the most potent, and certainly one of the safest psionic catalysts. The largely popular psi boosters are made from mindshrooms, in case you didn't know."The red mushrooms they have growing in the adjacent room are called Red Dream Mushrooms, they can be used to make something called gyromitrin, which is used in a number of powerful drug recipes. "I'm told you can teach psionics" "Yes, that is correct Are you interested in learning perhaps?" "No. I was just curious."I foolishly turned down this line of questioning, in a later update I'll go back and talk to Quinton again, as this leads to an easy quest, that can get you a free metathermic psi ability (or two if you haggle) but more importantly for us, finishing the quest will give us an xp point. "I see. Well, if you'll excuse me. I have work to do." "Do you have anything trade?" He stops working, sets the knife aside and carefully removes his gloves. Of course. Quinton's the stations bio chemical dealer, he sells mostly things are used in biological crafting. He's someone who will buy organs no questions asked too. He sells blueprints that will let us process organs and plants into more useful crafting ingredients too.  This image is a little out of sequence, but I forgot that there is also a crossbow in a locker near Quinton, it's technically labeled as stealing but Quinton doesn't seem to mind. Crossbow's are pretty good weapons in this game. Ammo is cheap and plentiful, they can do nasty criticals, they're completely silent weapons, probably only outclassed in range by sniper rifles, and you can make your bolts inflict all sorts of status effects. They're main drawback is that they're a little slow, and bolts will plink off of heavily armored targets. I ended up selling this crossbow, but it would have been handy for the quest Quentin gives you, oh well. We head into the agronomy storage room.       We find a bunch of useful items. We have the simplest trap, the hopper trap, they can catch hoppers easily, they aren't that useful but whatever we'll take them. Some flares, and some crossbow bolts, which we will sell since they're light and in demand. Some dog crates, we will take three of them as we will need them soon. Technically we want four but the forth can wait for now. And we also grab the throwing nets, nets are going to be very useful to our playthrough, being able to temporarily pin someone in place will give us a lot of control over the battlefield among other things. We will want as many as we can carry. Next we go say hi to Big Bret.  He's hanging out near the cave hopper cages, cute little hoppy things.  "They were pretty hard, but I like challenges." "You're going to love it here then. So what brings you to the Pens?" "What is this place?" "This is the agronomy sector where we grow and harvest all kinds of plants. But we also breed animals for food. In short, our job is to provide food to the station in any way possible." "Do you have anything to trade?" Bret's a good place to go to to pick up more nets, we take a few. We also grab some bear traps, the only useful trap that doesn't require any skill to use. He also sells blueprints for boots, combat gloves, and throwing nets. We will definitely want to grab these soon.  In the hydroponics section of Agronomy we see they're growing a plant in the water called Lake Poppy's. You can refine these to get morphine, we may wish to do this at some point.  We also find some glass bottles, in a nearby barrel. We grab them, they are useful. We finally head on down to the lower caves entrance.  We can see SGS employs security robots. As enemies these things are annoying little shits. Also, the key weakness of our build will be fighting robots. We will need to think carefully about how we go about tackling them. Stealth will not always be an option.  We head south and poke about SGS's docks.  There's a small passenger barge waiting at the wharf. We strike up a conversation with its captain.   "Never mind. I remember now: You're that new kid, right? Need a ride?"We could if we wanted pay for a ride over to a place called Junkyard. But we'll save our money for later. We'll make our way over there on foot pretty soon. "Catch you later." We can poke about inside this small warehouse nearby and if we time ourselves with the security bot patrols, we can sift through the contents of the shelves.  Score! We grab ourselves a free grenade, and I believe that's a Tungsten Carbide 7.76mm round too. Cash in pocket. We head back to near the elevator and head for the blast doors that lead into the cave proper, and have a talk with the checkpoint guard, Malcom.  "Know anything about that scavenger from Mushroom Cove?" "Well, one of the guards found him there, dying, just as I was starting my shift some hours ago. He was badly electrocuted, smelled horribly. Terrible things happen out there all the time, but this man was still alive when he was brought through here. Now that's something you don't see often. Sadly, that didn't last, as he died before reaching the medical level, though." "Did he manage to say who did this to him?" "No. Mushroom Cove's full of psi beetles. Could be them, as they got some nasty psi abilities at their disposal, but the way this scavenger's been hurt, it's somewhat different than anything I've seen the beetles do."Well, we now know it wasn't psi beetles that killed the scavenger but not much else. "How do I get to Mushroom Cove?" "It's a wet cave a bit south from here. But I‘ d advise against going there right now, Henrietta. It's a dangerous place for a rookie."Yeah we'll head there after we finish with this task for Tanner. "I need to get out into the caves." "You didn't get your access card yet, right? Yes. Should be around here somewhere. He starts looking through the drawers." "There it is. He produces a red access card and passes it to you. Now listen here, this is the procedure."Don't lose this card. I once stashed it somewhere before I went out into the caves by mistake, and it was an expensive nuisance to get back into the station let me tell you. "When you want to leave, you let me know and I'll open the inner gate. You then step into the transition room. Then I close the inner gate and open fine outer gate and off you go." "Alright, now, when you want to get back in, use the card I gave you on the console outside. Stand in front of the camera so I can confirm its you. Then I'll open the outer gate." "Earlier, we used to do bioscanning every time someone passed, but since no one ever showed up positive, it became a nuisance." "What if I do contract a disease?" "Then be kind enough to inform me so I can activate the turrets. They'll shred you to pieces, we'll burn fine remains and everything's good." He chuckles. "Just kidding, or am I?"No getting diseased, got it. "Open the gate, please I'm off to the caves." He nods. "Oh, and here's a tip for you. If you find yourself surrounded by rathounds, use flares to scare them away. They'll be back, though, so try not to stick around."This is one good reason why we want to hang onto flares. They're good crowd control for rathounds. "Thanks, I'll keep that in mind." "You're good to go."We finally head out into the wilderness for the first time.  Music - Caves  In the nearby outpost we can find a few lockers to sift through, they're mostly empty but I did find some fabric scraps, we can use these to make more fabric repair kits if we collect enough of them. We can also use them to make throwing nets too. We strike up a conversation with the old scavenger here.  This is Old Jonas, a glimpse into our potential future if we survive long enough in this place. "What is this place?" "This is the Crossroad Watch. The only way to get into our station from the tunnels is through here." "What are you doing here?" "Just sortin' through some goods I scavenged today. Wanna take a look, see if there's somethin' you like, before I take it back to the station? I offer a fair bargain." "Perhaps later." "Suit yourself." "I hear you are very knowledgeable of the tunnels and I could use some advice." "Been crawlin' through them tunnels all my life. What do you want to know?" "What can you tell me about the abandoned outposts nearby?" "The nearest one is just north of the Crossroad Watch. They stretch to the east and to the west from there. They were built by Omega station but are somewhat in ruins since we put them out of business. Plenty of rathounds there now."Omega station was a rival station of SGS. They've only just recently lost their fight against SGS and have been completely wiped out. "Oh, if you are heading there, could you do me a favor? I was scavengin' near those outposts a while back and I think I lost my old digital watch there. It was about this big and made of metal. It doesn't have a strap so I keep it in my pocket." "It must have fallen out somewhere. Could you keep an eye out for it? If you bring it back I'll make you a good bargain for it." "Metal detectors on! I'll have your watch back in no time." "I'm not gettin' my hopes up, but good huntin'."This will be a nice simple fetch quest for us to complete whilst we take care of our main task. "Is it really true that you descended to the bottom of Deep Caverns?" He laughs. "Listen, youngster. There's not a place in this accursed underworld these old legs haven't visited I've descended as low as one can go and I even took a peek into the dreaded mutagen tanks and..."Deep Caverns is a... special sort of place. Probably one of the most talked about parts of this game. One could describe it as challenging. Another way to describe it is utter bullshit. But that's a long, ways away from now. "Well, maybe I'll tell you more over a drink sometime." "How much damage did the earthquake do to the surrounding cave tunnels?" "Well, a lot of the passageways have caved in I'd use dynamite to clear them up, but Tanner confiscated all of it to make it available for clearin' up the South Tunnel. Can't say I blame him, the metro's more important."The way we'll be clearing out all the rubble will be to make T.N.T. charges and then blowing them up. But we can't buy any or blueprints to make any until after the early game is over. "The passage to the lake is clear, though, if you're up for some fishin' or somethin'."We will definitely do some fishing at some point, our high dexterity means we'll be pretty good at it too. "Can you tell me a bit about creatures that inhabit these tunnels?" "Well, there's cave hoppers, mole crickets, rathounds, psi beetles. and rarely shadow crawlers. What critter are you interested in?" "Tell me about cave hoppers." "They are harmless little critters; quite tasty if cooked properly too. You'll generally find them near lakes and off in wet caves 'cause that's where their favorite food, lake mushroom, grows."We will need to hunt down a few of these guys a bit later on as part of a quest. We will want to kill some too to pick up an oddity. But they are otherwise totally harmless. Slightly annoying because they have a tendency to bump into you when you're sneaking about which will cause you to exit stealth. "They can be hard to hunt down sometimes because they are fast little buggers and can crawl through small crevices you wouldn't think they would ever fit in." "If you're looking to catch or kill one, best tactic is to hide near a patch of lake mushrooms and ambush them when they come to feed."This is true, you can bait traps with cave mushrooms or just wait by cave mushroom patches to catch cave hoppers. It's the only useful thing about cave mushrooms and frankly that's not terribly useful but cool mechanic all the same. "What do you know about mole crickets?" "They're probably the smallest of the big insects. They are aggressive and will attack you if you come close, but they are not that dangerous. Usually you can just stomp them out or smash them with a crowbar or something." "Their bites are weak and you should be fine as long as you have some armor on you, but they are also acidic so don't let them nibble away on you too long or you will feel the burn."Molecrickets are probably the rarest creature in the game. We will fight them very early on and they will completely disappear from the rest of the game. They don't even repopulate like other animals will. Oh well they drop next to nothing, and are too weak to be anything close to a threat. "What are rathounds?" "Rathounds are ugly, smelly, mangy, disease ridden dog-sized rats. You can find them anywhere and if you can't find them somewhere, know that they'll get there too eventually." "Individually they are not so tough but they usually move around in packs, sometimes hordes. They are very good pack hunters, so don't let them surround you."This is good advice to heed, rathounds become stronger in packs. "If you are in a pinch, throw flares, they are deathly afraid of fire." "Psi beetles." "Now that's a critter you just want to steer clear of." "Scientists call them azure-something, because of their blue stripes, but the rest of us just call them psi beetles or psi bugs for obvious reasons. They are bugs that can sling all kinds of psionics at you." "If you bump into one, you might be able to take it, but it'll literally give you a headache." "If you run into two of them, you better start retreatin' while you can. At least they are not that fast, so you should be able to evade them." "You see, the weird thing is, not only do they hit you harder when they are in a group, they also start throwin' crazier and crazier stuff your way the more of them join the fight. And if there's also a goliath around, then you're in psionic hell."So psi beetles are kind of like cranium rats from Planescape, in that they get more powerful in groups. Unlike in Planescape: Torment however, a pair of psi beetles can be absolutely lethal if you're not careful early on. Three or more is a death sentence, if they're mature enough. At the very least we won't be tangling with any Goliath's any time soon. Among other dangerous things they tend to shepherd packs of smaller psi beetles around. "If you absolutely must fight them, try to get close and personal. They are not comfortable with exposing their massive brains to sling psionics while people are near them - not even the goliaths. Instead, they will either try to gain some distance or will just bite you and their bite is far less dangerous than their psionics. Goliaths have big horns, however, and those can easily go through a man."If all else fails, powerful explosives will also solve your psi beetle woes. "The psi beetles usually hang around mindshrooms, so if you're in an area where those're plentiful, be on your guard." "What are these shadow crawlers?" "Vile, awful insects that crawl around them cave walls, all quiet and sneaky. They surprise their victims by injectin' them with a good, healthy dose of paralyzin' venom, then retreat to the shadows until the poison makes you stiff as a rail. And then they eat you."Ahh crawlers... These things are the fuckin' worst. That's all I'll say about them at this point. He chuckles. "Don't start quakin' yet, 'cause they are rarely seen in close vicinity to SGS, but they're out there." "In case you notice things are gettin' a bit too quiet - be on the lookout." "Never mind Let me ask you something else." "Yeah?" "What are these Tunnelers I've heard people mention?" "The thing is no one really knows for sure who they are. They are nomadic people of the Deeps. People around these parts call them "Tunnelers" because they are known to dig wide sprawlin' tunnels throughout the underground, connecting remote places of the Underrail. But, again, no one knows why they do that." "Some say that they have a huge city in the middle of the Deep Caverns that you can reach if you follow the longest of their tunnels." "Some also call them "the Faceless" because they believe that under their huge masks they have no face. Superstitious folk don't like people sayin' that word though they say it can draw their attention to you."This must be an old line from an earlier script, nobody calls them Tunnelers everyone called them the Faceless, as I will be too. Now. A key word of solid wisdom for you, for when the time comes: Unless you're an absolute god at this game, DO NOT under any circumstances, gently caress with the Faceless. As far as you're concerned, they are your friends and you forgive any transgressions of theirs and do whatever they say. That is all. "Are they dangerous?"Yes. "Very, but they are not always hostile." "From my experience it's the smaller groups or individual Tunnelers that you should be most wary of. Larger groups generally leave other Underrail folks alone as long as they ain't botherin' them." "So you've met some personally?" "Don't think there's much to this underground world I haven't seen yet, but that's a story for another time." "Dang it, old man, you always hold back on the important parts."We can ask him more about these topics in better detail, once the early game is over "Haha, a good storyteller always leaves his public wantin' for more." "See you later, old geezer." Jonas is a good source of lockpicks and trapping sort of gear. I grab a Utility belt off of him because at the moment I can only use two utility items at a time, so having four is useful if you rely on a lot of gadgets to get by, which we will. Note our utility slots are the ones in the bottom right-hand corner of the interface. This is where you put things like grenades, throwing knives, non-standard crossbow bolts, and a few other things. Most other belts will only give you one extra utility item slot, but also do other useful things. And with that we're ready to head north to the old Omega outposts and prove ourselves a worthy asset to our new home station.  See you all next time. Also, as mentioned previously in the thread, I will be releasing crisper images from now on and will boost the dialog text size to make it easier to read. I will also make the dialog backgrounds opaque, both to assist in its readability and because it makes image to text programs much more accurate. Please do let me know if the improvements need more adjusting. Once my life gets more busy, I may be forced to just release the dialog as in game screenshots to cut back on editing time, this is a long game after all and we've barely just started, but we will see how things go. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Jan 7, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2022 11:27
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Oh hey it's this game  I sank a lot of hours into this after it came to steam but eventually burned out on it because it is filled to the brim with content. I explored every nook and quest around the SGS and back then there were no map features in the game so I had to work with maps made by industrious players and my own drawings of the cave systems. This may not mean anything to you if you've not played the game but if you did then you know how massive the world is. It was fun to comb through it but also exhausting. Especially if you do restarts to optimize your build. Other than that the game is great though and it really scratches the memory of the old fallout games very well. That's a tired saying by now I think but in this case it absolutely is true and if you're a fan of old CRPG games then there's a high chance that this game will consume you for a while. Though the one thing that you can't do in this game is to build a talky PC that can easily engage with 90% of the content iirc. The game demands a certain degree of specialization and will push your poo poo in if you don't abide. At least that's how it was when I played it. I stopped before the psi update and the DLC so I'll tag along. May even get to the see ending this time lol
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Dec 28, 2022 12:53
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Tin Tim posted:I stopped before the psi update and the DLC so I'll tag along. May even get to the see ending this time lol Expedition is really good. Worth playing through if you haven't. Yeah, first time trying the game out I basically got lost in Junkyard because there was no in-game map at the time. The game is more user-friendly now. Edit: Zeniel posted:
itry fucked around with this message at 14:47 on Dec 28, 2022 |
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Dec 28, 2022 14:41
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Chapter 4 - The Old Omega Outposts Welcome back to the all new and improved, Underrail Let's Play.  Where we left off we were heading north from the lower cavern crossroads to reactivate some defensive outposts for the glory of SGS.  And just as soon as I step into the area, I realised I should head back to see Quinton to start his psionic exclusive quest entirely just to get some xp.   "I'm told you can teach psionics."I managed to find Henrietta portrait on the wiki, I think it's just of a generic punk character, so I'm not sure if we'll bump into any doppelganger NPCs, thankfully. Well not ones that have much to say anyway. "Hm. Yes, that is correct. Are you interested in learning perhaps?" "Yes. Will you teach me?" "Hmm... I heard you scored highly on Tanner's tests, so yes, I will teach you what I can." "If you perform one little task for me." "Which task is that?" "You see, I was conducting some experiments on rathounds a while back. Was quite close to a breakthrough as well,until... a little accident happened and Bret forced me to get rid of the creatures. Hm." "Now I cannot finish the experiments. Not here anyway." "What happened?" "Well, I never really had an appropriate place to keep the rathounds, so I drilled breathing holes into a couple of those large crates and kept them there. It turns out I underestimated them and after a while they... chewed their way out of their predicament." "What kind of experiments were you conducting?" "I was working on developing a substance that would transform the muscle and other types of tissue into a potent mushroom fertilizer."It was mentioned that Quinton was former Biocorp scientist, an entity who most assuredly was engaged in highly unethical scientific endeavors, and it looks like he's still up to his old tricks. Come to think of it I'm not actually certain if rathounds were a product of theirs or one of the other corporations experiments, or if they've always just naturally existed. For that matter, I'm not even sure if Underrail takes place on Earth, or if that's just implied. It has been a long time since humanity went underground and unlike say in the Bethesda Fallouts, where everyone seems to have a working knowledge of what happened prior to the total collapse of society several generations ago, barely anyone in Underrail has anything close to a complete understanding of their current circumstances, and most people don't have the luxury to really care either. "What do you need me to do?" "I have prepared the final version of the concoction and filled a set of crossbow bolts with it. I need you to go out there into the caves and shoot a rathound with it, and then once it's dead, collect a tissue sample from around the wound." "If you don't have a crossbow, you can borrow mine. It's in that locker over there in the corner. It's not like I get touse it much these days anyway." Yeah... about that, I sold that crossbow last update, and I actually don't have enough money to buy it back. Oh well, we'll pick up a new one as we explore, no biggy. "And if I do this, you'll teach me for free?" "I'll teach you one psi ability for free. You'll have to pay for the rest."If you have a good enough mercantile you can haggle to get him to teach you two skills instead for free. That's a pretty good trade, but not for us, since when it comes to it, we will be burning things the old fashioned way. "I'll do it." "Excellent. Here are the bolts. Good hunting." Nod and leave.We equip the bolts to our belt and head back outside. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzU5pZwS2bU - Music - Caverns  We activate stealth mode, so we can sneak up on anything hostile, as a melee character who isn't going to be particularly heavily armored we want to make sure we have get as close as possible before combat starts.  And we quickly find out first rathound. There should be two running about nearby. Unless enemies are made stationary or given a patrol route, which are both typically behaviors reserved for humans, they will typically just random walk around the place, occasionally standing still for a few seconds. Notice the yellow eye above the rathound? Easier to spot than the rathound in the dark. This is a part of the stealth mechanics of this game. When you enter stealth, all other entities will have an eye above their heads. If they haven't spotted you, the eye will be green, if you are in a close enough proximity and moving, the eye will fill up and change to yellow. The speed at which the eye fills up, depends on you proximity, movement and stealth skill. After yellow fills up, it will turn orange. At this point, hostile entities will start to become suspicious and start to hone in on your current location. If the eye fills up again, it will turn red and this means you are still in stealth, but the entity has spotted you. If they are hostile, a combat round will initiate. Occasionally you will find an eye above an entity is silver, this means that stealth will never work on them. This largely includes cameras, but there are other entities that cannot be fooled either. They're not common, and it's thankfully not plot critical enemies or anything lazy like that. But its something to keep an eye on.  Anyhow we manage to get the drop on this one before it notices us, and we initiate combat. That's when that bar on the bottom right appears. The yellow part of the bar represents our movement points. The green bar is our action points. Actually, the yellow in this instance isn't our movement points, its just telling us how many action points we will be using to attack the rathound. We don't currently have any movement points, this is because we are in stealth mode. Unless you take some stealth related feats, you lose all movement points while in stealth and instead have to expend your action points to move instead. You can see by the targeting reticule we have a 95% chance to hit. Which is the maximum possible accuracy you can achieve. Apart from psi attacks which will always hit your target, although some psi abilities can simply fail if they are resisted.  Anyway, with our dexterity and gloves, assuming we don't use AP for anything else, we can currently attack an enemy five times in a single round. We also get a decent critical chance, thanks to our high dexterity whilst using a light weapon and carefully chosen starting feats. So this rathound goes down before it knows what's happening.  Searching the body we find is has an adrenal gland on it. We will definitely be harvesting any and all of these we can find. Once our biology skill is at 40, we can use these with ampules to extract raw adrenaline.  Just out of sight we find the next rathound, who we also easily sneak up on and take down in one round.  This one has another organ on it we can take, a healthy animal heart. With 25 Biology can use ampules to extract blood from these. Which can use in a number of drug recipes, particularly healing recipes. Depending on your playstyle, and difficulty level, we might not bother picking these up, as healing items are fairly plentiful and hearts are surprisingly heavy things to carry around. We got decent strength though so we'll haul them back to storage for later.  Heading north we find the first outpost.  The place looks pretty abandoned. If we had a high enough perception skill, we could find a trapdoor in the northwest corner that could give us an alternative way into a different outpost. We start looting the lockers. There's a switch on the wall we will need to activate, but we need to restore power to the outposts first.  Inside one of the lockers we find our very first oddity, Border Guard Orders. How the oddity xp works is this. Just above our quick item slots is a bar with 4 sections. This is the number of xp points we need to level up, so in this case we need 4 xp points to reach level 2. Studying an oddity will give us a certain number of points of xp, the exact number depends on the oddity. We can find multiples of the same oddity in the game, and we can study the oddity again for more xp. Although you can only study the same oddity a limited number of times. In the instance of Border Guard Orders, we can study it up to 3 times. We can pick up more of the same oddity if we wish but it won't give us anything. Oddities themselves don't weigh anything and won't clog up your inventory, they get their own separate inventory where you can marvel at them all, and check to see if you need to find more of a particular kind. They're usually location specific, so you can roughly guess where you might find more of the same kind. Annoyingly we will be missing a lot of early ones because of our lack of perception and agility (and pickpocket skill) but it won't hurt our survivability too badly in the long run.  We also find some caltrops, I'm never really bother to use these all that much, because they can also hurt you unless you're wearing metal boots or have the sure step feat. You can also make poisoned versions of caltrops too. But I think I will just be selling or ignoring them.  Not much else we can do here for the time being so we head west towards a fenced gate, where we can see more rathounds lurking in the shadows. If we were ranged a good trick would be to just shoot them through the fence. Alternatively using the gate as a bottleneck is useful if you're dealing with multiple rathounds.  There were two in this area, I managed to get hit a bit fighting them. Rathounds have 50 HP, and deal 4-8 mechanical damage. They're pretty strong, dextrous and very agile. So they move a lot and do a fair few criticals too, more so for us due to our recklessness feat. They'll can get up to 4 hits in every turn, but they have no resistances to anything whatsoever.  Up ahead is the next outpost, its front door is locked, this is the one we could enter through the trapdoor if were able to. We're plenty skilled with lockpicks however, so we easily pick the lock.  Inside we find an electronic repair kit, we probably won't be needing too many of these at least not at first. Not until we make ourselves some shock gloves anyway.  Some free health hypos and syringes, we'll need those to make drugs. We also find some more border guard orders in here somewhere.  Heading south we find the last rathound in this area. Already lone rathounds are not an issue for us. Annoyingly I'm having bad luck with their oddity drops. I'm pretty sure I didn't find a single rathound oddity drop through this entire recording session. Oh well, plenty more rathounds where that came from.  We make our way westwards.  We have a fence and a small passage leading south.  Down here there are about four rathounds all in a close distance to one another.  I decide to get a little sneaky about how to deal with them.  This passage is only one tile wide, so I set up a bear trap at its entrance and then leave stealth.  The bear trap drat near kills the rathound and holds it in place. It will cause all the other rathounds to conga line up behind it. If we had a gun, this is a good opportunity to kill the rathounds behind the trapped one whilst keeping out of its attack range.  Fortunately this time the rathounds were scattered widely enough that they didn't all rush in at once and I was able to pick off at my own leisure.  I managed to get two rathounds right up next to me before doing this however, so I can show off their pack hunting mechanic. This is why it's important to try and separate rathounds as best as possible. They are a lot more deadly in groups.  I use a bandage to fix up the damage I received.  Up ahead we find the next outpost, we do a quick sweep of the area and take out the remaining rathounds.  This one dropped our first piece of rathound leather. This a fairly common drop of rathounds. Sadly, it pretty poor quality and would probably make leather armor about as good as what we currently have on, if not worse. They don't sell for very much especially given their weight, so I don't bother to pick it up.  This rathound managed to bump into me, which just automatically ended stealth mode. Thankfully I managed to win the initiative round though.  The last rathound is hanging out by the gate.  Inside the outpost we can see the generator we need to power up.  We find various assorted junk in here, including gasoline, we can use this to make Molotov cocktails when combining them with rags and bottles, among other things. We go over an inspect the generator.  Insert flux controller.Flux controller inserted successfully. Status: Off Flux controller: Biocorp-Seddar FC-11z Turn onPower generator is operational. Status: On Flux controller: Biocorp-Seddar FC-11z  Now that the power is on we can start powering up the outposts. Strangely there is no light switch in this outpost, so the eerie blue light of the generator will have to suffice.  Up north we see the next area transition.  There's two more rathounds to take care of first.  They provide me with no real issues.   We find the next outpost.  We flip the switch to get some lights on in these dark caves.  Some of the nearby crates are electronically locked, so we utilise our haxxor and hacking skill to break them open.  No hacking mini game thankfully, just a slow progress bar and a lot of beepedy beeping.  Inside the crates is a guaranteed pistol. In our case, we got a 7.76mm hammerer. Hammerer pistols tend to be guns that take a higher caliber of bullets and will fire slower than other pistol varieties. Some people say this a bad thing as you want to be able to fire as often as you can with pistols. But there are some decent high caliber pistols builds out there. We take it to sell and then head north.   Around the corner there are a lot of rathounds, but they're all milling about an explosive barrel. A good strategy is to shoot the barrel or whip a throwing knife at it from a safe distance. I decide to throw a grenade at it instead for the extra blast area.  It works great! Frag Grenades and possibly other explosions are more deadly the closer to the center of the blast you are. In this case it doesn't matter, no simple rathound will survive a hit from a grenade. Do note, that grenades are not in short supply in this game, so don't be stingy with them. You can easily make and buy more, and you should! They are a real game changer in a lot of situations.  Sadly didn't hit all of the rathounds, but oh well.  One of the rathounds had Jonas' old watch on him. He'll be happy to have that back.  We make our way past the fence.  And find yet another outpost.  With somebody living inside.  And he's got pet rathounds too!  "I'm reclaiming this outpost in the name of the South Gate Station." "Haven't you vultures taken enough already? Caves belong to no station." "Now get the hell out of my home before I bolt in yourugly face." If our intimidation was good enough we could convince him that killing us would be futile as SGS would just come back in greater numbers. But our balaclava ain't that scary looking. "Alright, alright, I'm leaving."We will instead have to try and more subtle approach. "Hey M'lan!" "What?!" "Tony Lazuto says hello!" "Who-" M'lan Ratula isn't strong enough to survive a grenade, neither are his pets, but sadly they wouldn't get close enough to get them both. M'lan is deadly with his crossbow, so I highly recommend sucker punching him. I recommend this in all situations. There is no honor in Underrail so fight like the smelly rathound that you are!  His pet, Litsko survived, Gritsko and Litsko are apparently tougher than the average rathound. Not that I've ever noticed, they seem to die just as easily.  Boom! We've got ourselves another crossbow at last. He also has some burrower poison bolts, which is your classic does extra damage over time sort of poison, and he also has some vials. You can use vials to make different types of ammunition for the chemical pistol.  We equip it to our offhand, for easy access during combat.  We find a chew toy oddity nearby, which only can be studied once, but does give us 2xp instead. And that's enough to put us over the level threshold.   But first we flip the switch on this outpost.  We find some coal in a nearby crate. Coal is pretty useless in this game, most of the time. It lets you fuel campfires. There aren't a lot of campfires to fuel and even less reason to fuel them. There is one location that is the exception to this rule however. But we will ignore coal for the most part.  Anyway, we start upping our various stats. I always boost my melee to max, and up my throwing a little bit, plus I up my stealth, hacking and lockpicking.  I get my electronics to 20 and keep maximising my chemistry for now. I will regret not getting my mechanics to 10 yet, but that will hopefully be fixed before it becomes a serious issue.  We take opportunist as our second level feat. This is where our nets will start to come in real handy. Extra damage combined with frequent criticals will come in good handy.  Exploring the rest of the outpost we find a psishroom growing nearby, we'll grab it so we can make some psi-catalysts out of it later. We also see there is an elevator we can take down, it wouldn't be usable if we hadn't powered this place.  Down below we find some locked lockers.  Inside is another oddity, the omega id card. We'll be able to grab 10 of these, which is nice.  Eastwards we end up back out in the caverns.  There's a ladder leading up which we will be taking in a minute, but first we will explore a bit further down.  A bit east and south there is an outcropping we could scramble over if we were agile enough. It would lead to a small room with a psishroom and an oddity. Sadly we are forced to waterfall away. If we headed further east we would find another ladder, but we won't be going that way.  Climbing up the other ladder, we find ourselves in the final outpost.  Which we promptly power up.  Inside we find some cave hopper leather boots. Cavehopper leather is by far the worst protecting armor in the game, but it does always give you a free point of agility. We could even stack this with cave hopper leather armor. All leather boots will give you some extra stealth too. We put them on, because why not?  We also find the blueprints to make leather armor, which will be handy, once we get some actual tailoring skill.  Now this is a fantastic find! We just got ourselves some rathound leather tabi boots. Okay the fact they're made of rathound is nothing special, but tabi boots are fantastic, especially for a lot of melee builds. They make you move faster in and out of combat, they increase our defensive skills which we don't really care about but still nice, and they reduce the AP cost of melee attacks. They do come with the drawback of increasing our chance of being critically hit, which is already higher than normal but oh well. We are just going to have accept that we will be getting hit a lot when we do. At any rate we replace our newly acquired boots with other boots.  We pick the lock on the door and head out.  Around the corner is a rathound, that will be the perfect guinea rathound for Quinton's fertilizer experiments.  We sneak up nice and close to make up for the fact we have no crossbow skill and fire the special bolt right at it.  We hit it first try and then pummel the thing to death and retrieve the sample.  South of our position we stumble on more rathounds.  I test out my net throwing skills to both isolate and hit them for damage. Sadly you can't throw more than one net every 4 turns.  The opportunistic attacks give us a nice boost to our damage output.  I notice in this that our initiative rolls aren't that great compared to rathounds, we will want to boost this for future encounters, but we will have to wait to do this.  Ooh, just past those rathound to the east we find a cave entrance. This is one of the random locations that only sometimes appears during different playthroughs. These can be scattered all over the game, and the actual content of them can change too. We will explore this one in just a moment, we will head a little bit east first.  Up ahead is more rathounds!  A lot more rathounds! Now is an excellent time to use another grenade, so we do.  I have no idea how that explosion didn't hit me, but I won't look a gift rathound in the mouth.  Up ahead is a dead end. Those spiky looking rocks are rubble, we will need some powerful explosives to break through them, all other attacks will just be resisted. Which means we will have to finish a few more jobs for Tanner first. Further up to the west we would hit a dead end, if we had high enough perception we would find a trap door that would lead to the ladder we didn't bother going up, if we were playing on classic xp, we would get some xp from finding anything with perception, as well as lockpicking, hacking, pickpocketing, finishing quests and straight up killing. Anyway we swing back round to that side cavern and enter it.  Up ahead we see some dead things, we move in for a closer look.  We find a dead burrower, some dead spawn, which are infant burrowers and a dead warthog, all surrounding this beautiful waterfall that is tumbling down to places unknown. There is nothing on any of the bodies except the warthog.  Who has some intestines! Intestines can be broken down into Taurine with the right skill and an ampule. You use taurine in some advanced drug recipes. The real downside to intestines is that they weight a ton, so unless you are able to just refine them on the spot, I wouldn't bother collecting them. We are pretty strong and have ample carrying capacity so we will take them with us anyway.  Following the passage east we find the cave continues to another area. Note the difference between blue and red transition screens is that red transition screens have to a load a completely new area, where as blue ones don't. Highly interesting stuff.  Inside the new cavern we stumble upon our very first psi beetle. A young Azuridae. The young ones aren't too tough to kill thankfully, so we get right to bashing it in.  The only issue is that unless a psi beetle has exposed its brain to attack us, they are actually pretty tough to damage. Although we can still do decent damage to them regardless. They attack us with the first thought control attack, Neural Overload, it cannot be protected against, except for having a high will, and it will always hit and will always hurt. The trick to fighting psi beetles is to get up nice and close to them, they will scuttle away from you, then expose their brains and attack. But the time they waste moving will prevent them from attacking fully in one round. Then you close in and hit their exposed brains for more damage. If you corner a psi beetle or immobilise one and stand next to them, they will keep their brains hidden and just bite you, which is less damaging but makes it harder to damage them. Another good method is to just kite them around a corner and have them chase you, they aren't very fast and they will tend to charge you with their brains exposed and waste their whole turn, then you just ambush them and hope you take them down in one turn. (This strategy may not work on harder difficulties).  Unfortunately there were two more psi beetles lurking in the darkness. Which means they get their psi synergy.  Thankfully none of them bothered to use any other psi skill other than neural overload, but they could potentially start to freeze us or stun us with telekinetic punches. It's possible that the young psi beetles don't get more psi abilities, but they would still hit harder at the very least. At any rate three psi beetles is a death sentence at our level so I take no chances.  My last grenade finishes them all off quick smart.  Inside one of them we pick up our first psi beetle oddity, their brain. This will make up for the lack of rathound oddities.  We also find a psi beetle carapace on another, they're all pretty poor quality sadly. Not that it really matters to us. You can use this when constructing a tactical vest to add an extra layer of protection, which will boost your psi skills and also reduce the cost of your psi abilities, which is very handy if you were a psi mage. Alternatively you can use them when making a set of riot armor and use it as a riot shield instead. It will have the same effect, but its a shield. We don't care for any of these benefits in our build and carapaces are both quite heavy and not very expensive, so we will ignore them.  That was all I found in the side cave, so we head back to the entrance of it.  We make our way west of our position.  And we find ourselves back at the starting area of the outposts. With nothing left to do in this area we power up the two outposts we found initially.   And we that all done we head back to SGS to report on our progress.   We head back to Old Jonas, to return his favorite watch.  "I think I found your watch." Show him the old watch you found. "Yes, that's the one! Where'd you find it?" "In the belly of a rathound." He quirks an eyebrow. "I knew those things would devour anythin', but a metal watch..." "So... can I have it now? There're a few special items I can offer you for it. He rummages through his backpack "I've got this here powerful submachine gun; perfect working condition... I've got a set of healin' hypos... these are good for ya; and I've got these here fine lookin' boots. Look at 'em. They are fine. So what's it gonna be?"You can just give it to him for free, which I think makes him give you a discount, but we're not too worried about affording anything of his. We'll take the submachine gun, to sell later. "I'll have the submachine gun." "Here you go. May it serve you well." "See you later, old geezer." Home sweet home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krq6DBmrYZE - Music - Home Station We head back to Quinton to drop off the tissue sample.  "Here's the tissue sample wanted." "Excellent. Give it here." "I'm going to resume my tests right away." "Catch you later."We won't bother with the training, we wouldn't benefit from it anyway, but a free point of xp is always nice.  We make our way back to Tanner's office to give him the good news.  "I've reactivated the power generator, and all the stations I could find." "Good work, Henrietta. We can now start the restoration process. Here are your credits."The more of the outposts you manage to reactivate the more credits you receive. Really the only one you might not be able to turn on is if you had no lockpicking skill and perception. "Excellent. So what's next on the agenda?" "There are a few more jobs waiting for you actually. Bret needs someone to do a hopper round up. He'll instruct youon what exactly you need to do and how to do it. Go speak to him on the agronomy level." "After you've completed this task come and see me again." "I had a couple of questions, actually."These are some questions I forgot to ask Tanner earlier, but you can do so at any point in the game. "What can you tell me about those outposts near Crossroad Caves?" "They were used by the Omega as a part of the defensive perimeter against our station. We managed to break theperimeter, though and they've lain in ruin ever since." "One of the entrances to the Omega base lies to the north of them."We won't be exploring up that way any time soon. The lower caves are CRAWLING with issues. "Who are the Omega?" "They were a neighboring station, but unfortunately some hotheads - primarily on their side - decided thatcoexistence was not possible. A minor incident escalated into a series of skirmishes and then, finally, into a war." "Unfortunately for them, we were stronger and it was we who ended the war. They no longer have a station or acommunity, but we paid a high price as well." Comments like these make me glad there aren't any children in this game. "All of that could have been avoided, but what's done is done." "What can you tell me about the Protectorate?" "I could tell you a lot, but the important thing for you to know is that it's primarily a military organization led byGeneral Melek. Their goal is to unite all of the Underrail under their control. For what reason exactly - that is debatable." "Ignore the opinionated voices telling you the Protectorate is your friend or your enemy - it is neither. The existenceof such an organization at this point is unavoidable considering the political climate. While its manifestation could have been better, know that it could have been worse as well. Much worse." "As far as SGS is concerned, we're pursuing a clear policy of neutrality." "What is your 'policy of neutrality' exactly?" "It is the position we've taken in regards to the Protectorate and the United Stations in regards to theireffort to unite the whole of Underrail under their control." "We are not necessarily against the idea of unification, but at this point it would not be beneficial for us to be merged into this large centralized organization, since we stand to lose more than we might gain." "Also, many of our members came from different organizations that were, at various points, in one conflictor another with the Protectorate. Allowing Protectorate laws, and more importantly troops, jurisdiction over our territory may bring harm to our citizens. We cannot have that." "Perhaps at a different point, after the Protectorate and the United Stations are adequately reformed and a broadamnesty agreement is put in place regarding previous conflict... Perhaps then the time of unification will come." At some point we will have to make a choice regarding the Protectorate, but not today. "I'll see you later."After that interaction we've leveled up again! But we will deal with that and Bret's hopper round up, next time. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Jan 7, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2022 11:28
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Zeniel posted:Inside one of the lockers we find our very first oddity, Border Guard Orders. How the oddity xp works is this. Just above our quick item slots is a bar with 4 sections. This is the number of xp points we need to level up, so in this case we need 4 xp points to reach level 2. The Oddity system is fairly neat. A certain Oddity might be able to be used X times, and there will be Y instances of it scattered throughout a certain area (where Y > X). This means that the developers can hide neat rewards behind things, but you don't have to search every single pixel in order to get your allocation of XP for that region.
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Dec 31, 2022 12:30
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 03:13 |
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The text is much easier to read on mobile now, thanks! Yeah this basically seems exactly like Fallout 1/2 part 2 to me. I never played Fallouts 3+ so I can’t comment on which is better or how well that playstyle holds up but I probably would have loved this game as a kid and spent hours theorycrafting out builds.
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Jan 1, 2023 21:04
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