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Black Eels are our underground pirate bros.
Enrico la Spaniard fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Jan 8, 2023 |
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Jan 8, 2023 00:16
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| # ? Apr 16, 2024 13:22 |
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Black Eels
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Jan 8, 2023 01:25
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Scrappers got an in for us. Literally
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Jan 8, 2023 05:26
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Chapter 9 - wheeze, coughs violently, wheeze Whilst we wait for more votes on that front, we will continue with our pre-depot A meddlings.  We make our way back to Junkyard.  We won't bother re-equipping our weapons just yet, we'll be going back into the embassy very shortly. A nearby stranger stops us to tell us something.   "Where did you hear this? How do you know who I am?" "Just sayin' what I heard, is all. You wanna know more, you gotta go and speak with this guy."If we were intimidating we could threaten him for more info, but he doesn't really know much of who wants to talk to us. "Would a few charons make you more talkative?" He calmly replies. "I told you everythin' I know, sister."At least he doesn't swindle us. "I guess I'll have to go and talk to this person." "No prob, sister." Let's go back to the bar and have a chat with this stranger.  I stop by Kendrick's to pick up a fishing rod and a pile of poisoned throwing daggers, I like using these to finish off far off stragglers from grenade attacks.  I also sell some of the guns and armor we've been carrying around to Len. Our cash supplies are about to grow quite large.  I drop off all of our excess trade fodder in the nearby dumpster and head for the bar.  We'll ask Kareem about the Mushroom Cove Scavenger. "Heard of a guy named Chester Royce?" "Yeah. He stops by occasionally. Bald guy. Scavenger. Kinda tall. Why?" "Do you know where I can find him? And did he come alone or with someone?" "Now that you've mentioned it, he did always come with another person -" "except when he came in a day or so ago. He asked me if someone was looking for him, someone called... eh... J-J-J..." "Joshua." "Yeah. Joshua. That's the one. This is the first time I see him since. He asked me that, then he left. Didn't hang out for long. Think he went south afterwards. Can't be sure. Haven't seen him since."South is where our next clue will lie. We could have just stumbled upon the next place without following this information trail, but I think it's harder to piece together what to do after we visit the next place and will require us to head back to SGS. Nod and leave. I sell some more food to Kareem.  There's a new person hanging out the front of the bar. He's probably the guy who wants to talk to us.  Oh how I hate editing your dialog Abram.  "You are..." wheeze "Henrietta of the..." wheeze "South GateStation..." wheeze. "Is this correct?" "That is correct." "I am Abram..." wheeze "and I have a business..." wheeze "proposition for you. My sources tell me..." wheeze "you have recently visited the embassy of our--" coughs violently "our Union friends." "I wish to purchase..." wheeze "information that you might have..." wheeze "acquired during this visit. This information does..." wheeze "not pertain to the purpose of your visit..." wheeze "so this talk will not challenge your loyalty to your own station..." wheeze "if you foster any." "Are you..." wheeze "interested?"Now, you might be thinking, as I initially thought, that Abram is a Free Drone agent and he's looking to recruit us to do some sabotage against the Protectorate. This will turn out not to be the case. Abram is... someone special. We will want to impress him. So let's give him what he wants. "Sure, I'm always up for a friendly chat. What do you want to know?" He nods slowly. "How many men..." wheeze "are guarding the entrance to..." wheeze "the embassy courtyard once you get past..." wheeze "the gate?"If we had high perception the correct answers to these questions would be highlighted for us. As it stands we will have to use our fallable human memory instead. "One and there was another in an adjacent room." "Were you allowed to..." wheeze "enter the courtyard?" "Yes." "How many guards did you see there?" "Two or three." "Were there any guards..." wheeze "in the embassy offices?" "Yes, at least one." "Did you see--" cough, cough "or hear any dogs..." wheeze "anywhere on the embassy grounds?" "No, I saw no dogs." "Any turrets?" cough cough "Yes, two at the entrance." "Just one more question..." wheeze "are you allowed to go back to the Embassy?" "Yes." "That is all..." wheeze "I needed to know." "Kareem will give you your..." wheeze "money." "There is also a way..." wheeze "for you to earn more. If you are interested..." wheeze "come to me again and we can talk further." Coughs violently.Now I'm pretty sure Abram already knows the answer to these questions and he's just testing us. This is reflected in the reward you receive for answering the questions correctly.  "This can buy you a couple of eel sandwiches." Nod and leave.Let's see what Abram wants now.  "Tell me what you had in mind." "I need to deliver..." wheeze "a present to our friends in the Union embassy. He coughs violently. "But it's a surprise... wheeze "so they mustn't know about it." "I fear if I was..." wheeze "to deliver this present myself..." wheeze "I wouldn't be allowed to leave anytime soon." "What is this present you want me to deliver?" "It is a little pet..." wheeze "very lovable..." wheeze "likes to hang out in ventilation ducts. You must place it there..." wheeze "without anyone noticing." "Do you think you..." wheeze "would be able to do this?" "I can do that." He coughs violently. "Excellent..." wheeze "once you've done it..." wheeze "I will pay you five hundred charons." He slowly reaches into one of his overcoat pockets with both of his hands and removes something. He holds itbetween his palms and brings it close to his mask. You are not sure what it is, but you can make out small insect-like legs protruding from the sides. He holds it there as if speaking to it, but no sound comes from either of them. He reaches over and grabs your arm with one hand and lets the creature grapple onto you. You can now clearly see it's a tiny burrower spawn.Oh, fun. Abram's long bony fingers and the creature's tiny legs both feel equally disgusting on your arms. There is barely time for panic, though. The creature quickly skitters over your arm and torso until it finds asuitable pocket in your clothes to hide in. Just what I've always wanted. "Remember..." coughs "you must release it near a ventilation shaft..." wheeze "It will find its way onwards from there. He lets go of your arm."Now I'm pretty sure this, thing, is just a listening device and not a biological weapon that will infest the embassy with burrowers. As I first thought it would be. Incidentally Abram will ignore you if you try to get him to answer any questions relating to who he is or why he's doing what he's doing at this point in the game. Just do what the nice mans asks you to do, he pays really well.  Back into the embassy with us.  Now there are a number of ways we can pull this off. If our hacking skill was too low, we could talk to the deputy in the next room and convince them we dropped a tiny object in the ambassadors office and he'd go find it for us like the good northern college boy that he is, and we could use the vents in his office to plant the bug.  Otherwise I normally just hack this door in between the patrols of the one guard with eyes on this door, and sneak in when he's on the opposite side of the courtyard.  If you can't sneak, it does make this a lot trickier, especially leaving the room, but its still possible. There aren't any purely stealth missions in Underrail. There are a few areas where sneaking is by far the best option, but there's always another way. If in doubt you can often get by with just making or shopping around for some high quality stealth attire and that will usually be sufficient, even if your natural stealth skill is 0.  We run up to the vent and use the Cybernetic Spawn.  You can also break into the vent yourself and plant the spawn whilst you're in there. But that's unnecessary.  And then we just walk out of the embassy like we forgot what we went in there for. And they're none the wiser.  I make sure to re-equip my gear.  And it's back to Abram.  Nod "You will find your..." wheeze. "money with Kareem again. Leave me now..." wheeze "I have much to do. Perhaps..." wheeze "I will call upon you again soon."He'll have more work for us in a little bit, so we'll busy ourselves until that occurs.  Abram pays incredibly well. Nod and leave.  We head on up to Depot B to chat with the Scrappers.  We stop by Gort to ask him about his ridiculous name.  "Would you happen to by any chance have an Armadillo class drill rotor circuit board?" "Well, ya can look around but I'm pretty sure I don't have none of that stuff." "It's not that common of a digger nowadays, sis, so we don't look for its parts when scavengin' the Old Junkyard." "What's the Old Junkyard?" "Depot A. It's right through that gate over there in the back." Points his thumb over the shoulder. "We keep it under a lock 'cause there're some nasty creatures roamin' around there. Ya wouldn't want to meet none of 'em, sis."Oh pshaw, how nasty could they possibly be? "Can I go in and look for that part I need?" "I doubt it, sis. Ya could go ask Eddy if he'd let you in, but don't get yer hopes up." "Who's Eddy?" "Eddy's the big boss round 'ere. He leads the gang and run this place." "Catch you later." We pick up some more lockpicks and some more explosives.  In the far west building is the Scrapper gang leader, Eddy.  "Tell me about Scrappers." "That's my gang. We extract the valuable stuff from the Old Junkyard and sell it all over the South. The Foundry and Core City are our biggest customers." "We are also in the business of killing people who try to muscle in on our turf, so don't even think about it."As much as we're desperate to get into the 'selling literal garbage to people' racket, we'll make sure not to heed his warning. "I need to get into the Old Junkyard." "No dice. It's Scrappers only zone, sister." "What you're looking for there anyway?" "Some drill parts." "Hmm... We don't usually allow outsiders in there, but I guess I might be able to let you slip by. That is, if you're willing to do me a favor first." "What kind of a favor?" "I need to retrieve something from... an associate of mine." "Alright, that sounds simple enough. I'm listening." "Let's discuss this somewhere more private." Follow him.Eddy moving to a new location can be annoying, I assumed after doing his tasks that he'd be back in his old spot, but he was still back in his new spot and I thought the game had bugged out and he'd disappeared.  "Look for a guy named Elwood and get his keycard off him. I have no idea how you'd do it, though. Avoid fighting him if you can, and if you absolutely must kill him for it, make sure no one sees you."We're going to kill Elwood, since we don't have any way to pick his pocket. It's not going to be a big deal and despite his dialogue, Eddy doesn't actually care at all. "If other Scrappers see you attacking him, the whole deal is off and I'll have nothing to do with you, understand?" "Alright, I'll do it." "That's the spirit. Let me know when you got the keycard." Since we're in the neighborhood, we stop by to say hi to Grover.  "I'm here for Dockmaster's money, Grover, so pony up." His expression remains unchanged. "Look, I told Silas already. I just don't have any money right now. I'll pay him back as soon as I can." "And when's that?" He stares at you. After a few seconds, his expression slowly begins to break. "I'll... I'll have it real soon, I promise. I promise." (Intimidate)" Any last words, Grover?" "No, please... Please!" "That's pathetic." At this point Grover will attack us with his puny little arms.  Once you get his health low enough, if he lives to see the next turn...  He will surrender.  We could have skipped to this point if we were intimidating enough, but whatever. "Speak quickly." "Treasa... everyone thinks she's poor, but that's not true... She's got this energy core device with her she showed me once... It's got to be worth at least a couple hundred charons..." "I don't know why she keeps it instead of sellin' it. She's completely derailed, you know. Like one of them Lunatics, yeah." He smiles, but the smile quickly dies down. "I can, yeah, I can lure her to the back alley behind my house. Then you can come and snatch it. That'd... repay my debts, right?"Yeah, we COULD do that, but that would just drag us about the place, we'd have to kill another person and then haggle the power core with a merchant for 100 charons, which we probably won't get, so lets just kill him. "No deal, Grover. I'm not extorting your debt from someone else. Now die like a man."Grover collapses like a poorly built house in a swamp.  We take his head for our collection, and recycle his clothes for scrap. Then we bring the news to Silas.  "About that Grover guy..." "Did you handle the situation?" "The poor sap couldn't pay up." Give him Grover's head. "So... he really was tellin' the truth about bein' broke. Regretful, but you did what had to be done. Good job." "So what's the other thing you want done?" "Go talk to Captain Broderick there at the wharf. He was transportin' some cargo for us when the earthquake started and a big wave knocked some of it off the boat." "He thinks he knows where it might've washed up, though. He'll ferry you over there to look for it." "Why doesn't he look for it himself?" "No clue. Some nonsense about the island bein' cursed. You know how superstitious sailors can be." "Alright, I'll do it."This tasks going to be a bit more challenging so we'll hold off on doing it right this second. "Excellent. Talk to Broderick when you're good to go." Instead, we'll head north of the fishermen in the slums, towards the casino.  You have to pay to enter the casino. You can sneak in too, but it turns out I'm not stealthy enough to make my way to non hostile area reliably enough, so I'll just pay the entrance fee.  "Yeah, can I come in?" "Sure, sure, but all new members must pay twenty charons admittance fee first."Blergh I don't wanna pay 20 charons. But oh well, we're pretty wealthy. "Alright, fair enough." Slip the charons through the designated crack in the door.We slip the charons into the mans crack and in we go. "Welcome aboard." It's pretty dark for a casino.  We've got a few game rooms around the place. Sadly and surprisingly we can't actually participate in any gambling in this game.  The two game floors are connected by a dark hallway. Elwood will occasionally walk between the two locations, so we will wait for him in the hallway.  He walks right into us.  So we give him the ol' spicy taser surprise and he's dead before anyone knows what's happened. If you can kill Elwood in one round in this hallway, no one will bat an eyelid. You don't even have to be stealthy about it. You could fire a entire assault rifle magazine into his chest and no one will suspect foul play. People will come to investigate the noise, but all will suspect natural causes.  We grab the key card Eddy wanted.  He also has a Scrapper Insignia oddity on him, you can usually pickpocket these off of most other scrappers too.  He also has the Loaded dice oddity on his person too. We are able to level up after all this.  We finally get our Chemistry to 50 and our Biology to 40.  So now we make adrenaline.  Which means we can make adrenaline shots. This puts us in a very good position going forward.  We can also now make Mk III frags too, that gives us a far greater advantage in many encounters.  And look! Vince and his goomba's have volunteered to test them out for us.  There's four of them and they're a bit spread out for a single grenade, but that's okay. It kills the three that it hits.  And then I can just stun the guy left standing.  He takes two turn to go down. But go down he does.  I retrieve my extorted cash and then some.  One of them had smart goggles too, you can use these to boost damage of special attacks. I'm not sure I bother with them, this build is surprisingly light on special attacks we're more about hitting as often and as critically as we can instead.  Vince's overcoat is slightly better than ours so we get a nice upgrade too.  And I pick up a fresh balaclava to boost our sneak a little more.  We then head back to Eddy to give him the good news.  "I got Elwood's key card." Give him the keycard. "Very good. And what about Elwood?" "Had to ice him, I'm afraid." "Too bad. Was hoping to do that myself at some point. But never mind." "Ok, here's what you do next. Go to the back alley north of the tavern and find Elwood's house. It won't be hard to spot. It's the only one with decent walls and an electronic lock." "I need you to retrieve something from there." "And what's that?" "I need you to find something that resembles a disk. It's dark green and rough on the surface, and it's made of something that's not quite stone and not quite metal." "It's kinda hard to describe, but you'll know when you find it, trust me." "Alright. I'll find you your disk." "I'll be waiting. Good hunting." "Oh, and just one more thing. From what I've gathered Elwood used to be pretty good with mines, so watch your step in there."He's got more than mines in there, but this shouldn't too difficult for us.  Squeezed between Len's shop and Groverhaus is a back alley.  It leads to a smallish area with three buildings, all with locked, unpickable doors.  Elwood's is the south most one. He had an EMP grenade in one of his lockers. We make our way down the trapdoor.  Music - Warehouse horror Quite the operation Elwood had down here.  We casually tred on one of his mines.  The main area of this place has three sentry bots, that all still give me a bit of grief.  Fortunately our MkIII grenades are actually powerful enough to destroy them in one go.  We also find our first sentry bot oddity, a Registration Plate.  We then spend a long hard day in the mines.  We find another Strange Comm Device, and a stuffed bat. This is food that helps detect hidden enemies more easily. I never use them, although it wouldn't be a bad idea to remember that.  We finally find Elwood's bedroom setup. It's heavily mined, but I have a trick to deal with lots of mines, when you don't have a means to spot and or disarm them.  You just lob a grenade into the room, it sets off all the mines in there in a satisfying chain reaction. This is also a handy way of utilizing your own mines actually. You just make a mine field in a patrol path, then wait till your victim is in the middle and throw a grenade at him for mass damage. At any rate Mk I grenades are now our designated mine clearers.  We are now able to pick the lock on his desk. I believe there was a few charons inside.  In his footlocker we find our very first energy pistol. A laser gun. Energy pistols also come in three varieties. Electroshock, plasma, and laser. Electroshock pistols do electricity damage, whereas laser and plasma pistols do the rare and effective plasma damage. Plasma and electroshock pistols do insane amounts of damage, but they are very slow firing weapons. Laser pistols fire much faster but don't do as much damage. Other than that, energy pistols all run on batteries, they are lightweight, and are worth a mint so they're worth taking for that reason alone.  And here is the mysterious disk. It certainly lives up to its name. It's funny for the longest time I thought this was actually a data disk. But it's just a geometric disk. We can eventually figure out what this things original purpose was, it even has some interactions outside of this quest line. But its not plot critical or anything beyond this quest.  We're good at hacking but this door is pretty tough. I really should buy a better quality haxxor at some point, just to have a bleeding edge.  And Elwood's ghost gets his revenge as I promptly stumble into one last mine as I leave this place.  "I found the disk. Here you go." Give him the mysterious disk. "Ha-ha, I knew you could pull it off! Good job. I'll let the guards know you're allowed to pass into the ol' Depot A. Just go through the back door over there in the HQ and turn right."Now we have access to Depot A, but we won't be going in there just yet, although we'd probably do okay at this point. "I could use someone like you for another job. If you're up for it, come and see me later."This next job is last Scrapper quest so we won't be doing it unless we want to side with them.  For now, let's go grab Kohlmeier's knife, the hidden passage is just here. I think you can just stumble on this accidentally if you're lucky enough.  The passage area is packed with rathounds, but we fear not their dreadful squeaking.  They respond negatively to explosives as always.  At the back is the entrance to Kohlmeiers backyard.  He's got some nice mindshrooms growing here.  Inside is a guy named Vilmer, he can be pretty tough if you're not prepared, he got a good chunk of health and he's pretty lethal with his pistol too.  But he's not prepared to face a taser.  He has Kohlmeier's Lucky Knife on him, a unique weapon, I think it's unique ability is it lowers unarmed crits against you. Pretty useless. We also grab the key card to the front door too.  In the nearby footlocker, we find our first scrapture oddity, they're all over Depot A.  He also has an oxygen tank, that you can use to make psi inhalants.  We sneak out the front door and nobody spots us, then we head back to Kohlmeier.  "Here's your knife, old timer." Give him the knife. "Hee-hee, my old lucky knife! I thought I'd never see you again!" "Well, I'll leave you two to catch up." "Hey... thanks. Best of luck, youngster." "You're welcome, and you too, old timer. Goodbye."We head down to the docks.  Next time we'll make our way to Silent Isle to retrieve the missing cargo for Silas. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Jan 8, 2023 |
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Jan 8, 2023 05:33
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There are no pure stealth missions, but god, next Abram mission sucks balls without stealth.
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Jan 8, 2023 10:42
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Broken italics tag in mid update, so the rest of it is italicized. Also, couldn't you use Grover to ambush whoever and then kill him on the spot?
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Jan 8, 2023 14:43
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Honestly, I'd just include a note before Abram conversations saying something like "he wheezes and coughs a lot" and skip including every last mid-dialogue description of that nature. Might save you some headaches.
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Jan 8, 2023 15:12
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Can I vote for neither? Just walk in without premission 
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Jan 8, 2023 15:58
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Xander77 posted:Broken italics tag in mid update, so the rest of it is italicized. I renew my hatred of editing Abrams dialogue. You can yes, but I didn't really see the point. Unless I really wanted that other persons power core, which I didn't, I just saved myself the effort. I mean it might be worth doing if you wanted the experience in classic xp. But yeah, there'll be plenty of other power cores to find. Enrico la Spaniard posted:
Although thinking about it I'd still have to delete every instance of him coughing and wheezing. So it's an effort either way. itry posted:Can I vote for neither? Just walk in without premission The vote isn't about getting permission to enter Depot A, we'll get that from both of them, super easy. It's about deciding which gang we're going to side with in taking over the rest of Junkyard, eventually. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Jan 8, 2023 |
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Jan 8, 2023 18:01
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Zeniel posted:You can yes, but I didn't really see the point. Unless I really wanted that other persons power core, which I didn't, I just saved myself the effort. I mean it might be worth doing if you wanted the experience in classic xp. But yeah, there'll be plenty of other power cores to find. Apparently we interacted with both gangs, but they haven't left enough of an impression for me to have any idea as to which is which. The pirate gang should have at least had a West Country accent.
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Jan 9, 2023 00:50
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Chapter 10 - The Curse of Silent Isle Music - Watercaves All aboard the garbage scow to pick a package from an island with a terrible secret.   I'm not sure it's ever explained why the ferry's aren't traveling anywhere at this point. But whatever. "I'm here to help you recover that lost cargo." "So, Silas found someone derailed enough after all. Look I'll take you there, but I ain't stepping farther than the shore. I'm no quaker, but that place gives me the creeps." "What's so scary about that place?" "Well, I ain't of the superstitious kind. I mostly dismiss the derailed sailor tales on account of them being products of eating too many mushroom cupcakes, if you know what I mean."Strap yourselves in, it's ghost story time. "But this one I know to be true from my personal experience, you see. There's something... wrong on the Silent Isle. I don't know if it's haunted or what, but I tell you there's something strange going on there." "Like what?" "Alright, listen here..." "This one time I was sailing back from Core City when I started having problems with the engine's power converter. To fix it I had to turn off the main engine and I didn't want to do that in the middle of the river because the current was strong and I knew there were some stalagmites around I could crash into." "So I anchored at this nearby place the sailors call Silent Isle. I heard tales of it being cursed and how anyone who spends too much time there is never seen again, and such nonsense. But that didn't scare me. The only thing I cared about is whether there were pirates there, and as far as I could tell there weren't any." "I turned off the engine and main lights because I didn't want to be seen and I also didn't want them to drain the battery before I could finish the repairs."This is about the only clue we'll get into how to deal with Silent Isle. "So I was working there in silence with just a flashlight on so I could see what I was doing. It took me hours to fix the converter, but I managed to do it." "I powered up the engine and started to retract the anchor." "And I switched on the Main Lights." "That's when I saw it... or should I say him. I saw me! Standing there on the shore looking back at myself." "It's not just that I saw a guy that looked a lot like me, or even that I saw a guy that looked exactly like me... He was wearing the exact same clothes I was with exactly the same stains and tears that my clothes had. It was like I was looking into a mirror, except his pose was different." "And you know what the weirdest thing was? For a few brief moments I couldn't really tell which one of us was real. That was the creepiest feeling I ever had in my life." "I didn't know what to do. I just stood there staring at him and listening to the anchor pulling up." "And nowadays I just steer clear of that island altogether." "drat, listening to that gave me the heebie-jeebies."He nods. "Yeah. So you sure you want to go there after all?" "Yeah, let's go." "Alright, jump aboard." Sail to Silent Isle. Welcome to Silent Isle. It's not a very big location, but definitely an interesting one.  You see, as we walk around the island, we will start get a strange feeling wash over us. The longer you hang around, the strange feeling will start to stack. If it reaches level four. Bad things start to happen.  The only way to remove the strange feeling, is to stay illuminated. The best way to do this is to stand in eerie glow of the mindshrooms dotted throughout the island.  This makes sneaking around the island more difficult, and the native fauna aren't going to like that.  I decide to keep the illumination theme going by lobbing some Molotov's about the place. They have a great advantage against rathounds as the light they produce also sends all of them into a panic. We also see that one of the rathound alpha's has caught fire.  The two alphas run off to the left whilst the others scatter to parts unknown to the right.  We make quick work of the alphas all while juggling our strange feelings, just like in real life.  Continuing to follow the east coast, it eventually circles around west.  Towards the north end we find a small cave opening which we enter.  Don't let the strange feeling fool you, the feelings won't affect you anywhere in this cave.  In the middle of the cave we find something, very unusual.  Focus your mind on the pillars.You clear your mind of other thoughts and focus just on the sound of the pillars and the glowing symbols. As time passes you lose the perception of the world around you. You can no longer hear the water dripping from the cave ceiling or the insects skittering amongst the mushrooms. Everything except the strange symbols is darkness and the only sound is the humming of the rock. You realize this could be dangerous. So in order to safely interact with this strange pillar, we need at least a Will score of 7. We obviously don't have that, so this is going to end well. Continue focusing.You try to stay focused on the pillars but you are overwhelmed by a disturbing feeling that there are more people in the room standing close to you. Your concentration breaks. Uh oh...  At this point four doppelgangers that look like Henrietta spawn in. If you let your strange feeling hit level four, one of these will spawn as you walk around the island. If you aren't a thought control psionic, doppelgangers are bad news. They are fairly fragile, but are also completely immune to all forms of damage, except from that done by the neural overload ability.  Your only saving grace against them is that, typically, they will only last for a few rounds and then disappear. One on its own, hits pretty hard, but you can potentially outpace its lifespan. Two at once, will hit you enough that you won't be able to out heal them and it's basically a death sentence. Four doppelgangers is complete overkill. So let's reload and not keep staring at the pillars instead. Break the trance.You break away from the trance and the world slowly forms again around you. You are unsure how much time has passed, but your head hurts from staring at the symbols and your feet are sore. It is technically possible for me to hit a will of 7 temporarily, albeit with some difficulty, but I could come back here and interact with it if we really wanted to. If we do succeed you receive a weird vision and the thought control psi ability Bilocation, which lets you make doppelgangers of enemies to help beat them to death. The pillars give you some pretty interesting visions, so I'll put them in spoilers below if you're interested in knowing what we see if we succeed in focusing on the pillar. You see a man sitting on a throne in a large sphere orbiting an invisible star. Millions of miles below, you hear wind sweeping across desolate landscapes carrying sand and dust. The sand scrapes across a naked man, tearing the skin away and revealing the robot body beneath. Great hydraulic pumps expand the universe until nothing can be seen. Successfully concentrating on the pillar would also remove the strange feeling curse on the island too. Since we failed, we'll just have to deal with it. I'm thinking it might be worth picking up neural overload from Ezra at some point, it's free and doesn't require any thought control skill to learn. It might be handy to have to fight back against any doppelgangers that come against us in future.  West of the cave is a small colony of psi beetles, some of the rathounds that fled from us are hanging about too.  Our grenades are more than capable to dealing with psi beetles now.  I'm not sure I'm currently close enough to the mindshroom to stave off the strange feeling.  A flare will help us avoid fighting more doppelgangers.  I lob a net at the far off psi beetle to make it easier to hit.  I then use an adrenaline shot to close the gap before it gets a chance to attack.  I can still barely hurt a closed mind psi beetle, but my criticals are decent, and I can occasionally get a breather by not attacking when the beetle is dazed, which prevents it from getting another turn. The daze effect will go away if you hit a dazed enemy.  Another straggler comes up behind me, and they get a fresh grenade.  The crate at the back of the island had a periscope part oddity in it.  And next to it is the lost cargo we came here for.  Making our way down the west coast of the island, there's a rubble pile we check out.  It's got another trilobite oddity in it.  Circling around back to boat, we arrive in the safe glow of Captain Broderick's ship.  "I found the cargo, let's go." "Perfect. Let's bail." Sail to Junkyard Music - Junkyard Back in Garbage Land, we head back to Silas.  "About that lost cargo..." "Had any luck findin' it?" "Yeah, got it right here." "Excellent. You just saved me some money, kid. And in turn, as promised, I'll save you some." "Okay now, here's what you gotta do: First, take this key... Go to the slums and look for the shack with an air vent right next to the door. It's in the southeast part of the slums. The key will unlock that door." "Inside you're gonna find a trap door that'll lead you to 'the wormhole'. And 'the wormhole' will lead you into Depot A. And when you're done with your business, girl, come see me again. I might have some more work for you."Now we have two ways we can enter Depot A. We're probably at a level where we could do that successfully, but we'll grab a few more levels first. You can really feel the difference between a few levels in Depot A. I think one of the things that really holds people back with that place is going in there very underleveled. Let's just pick up this next mission from Silas. "You mentioned you got some work for me." "I did. Do you know who the Scrappers are?" "Yes." "Of course you do - they run the other half of Junkyard. They control the entrance... well, the main entrance to the Old Junkyard, and for that reason they got far stronger presence there than we do. Which means they get first dibs on most of the goodies uncovered there." "I aim to change this." "You see, now that we have 'the Wormhole' we can get a drop on them, do the whatcha-call-it, pincer attack. But there's a problem: They still hold the chokepoint right between the Old Junkyard and their base. If we choose to fight there, I expect it ain't gonna go too well for us." "There might be a better way to access Scrappers HQ through the Old Junkyard. If someone out there knows a way, that would be Blaine, a former Scrapper. That old rat used to do scavengin' runs every day back in his prime."Even if we don't want to support the Eels, locating Blaine is well worth doing. "And where do I find this Blaine guy?" "Well if I bloody knew that I wouldn't need you now, would I?" "He doesn't show his face much around here no more. He had a fallout with Eddy, the Scrapper boss, so he has no one to watch his back on the streets. If he's somewhere in Junkyard, it's probably some safe place where he don't have to worry about bein' attacked by either gang. Ask around the slums, someone might know somethin' there." "And, yeah, his old pal Jonas might know where he's at. You might want to pay a visit to your fellow Southgater."Old Jonas does know where Blaine is, but he'll take some persuading. Since we're not the most persuasive of individuals, we'll have to take to the slums instead. "You up for this job? Find Blaine and find out if there are any alternative routes into Scrappers HQ from inside the Old Junkyard." "If we pull this off, girl, there's gonna be plenty of stuff for all of us to plunder from the Scrappers, he-he."All the rusted axles we could ever want. "Sure. You can count on me." "Great. Get that info outta him - one way or the other. You might need to ruff him up a bit, but be careful. Blaine's one old cunnin' rat, he is." Stupidly forgetting to actually ask around about Blaine, I head off for the caves again. Music - Watercaves  Some of the psi beetles around Mushroom Cove have started respawning.  South of Mordre's fishing spot, we should be capable enough to have poke about now.  The area is also populated with many a cave hopper.  There's a small bridge heading north.  On the other side is a single young psi beetle that goes down no problem.  Further up is three psi beetles, these would normally be extremely dangerous for us.  But they can't stand up to a Mk III hand grenade. We can also see some rubble blocks our progression any further in this direction.  There's yet another trilobite fossil oddity down this way, and that's all there is to see. Suddenly realizing that we need to actually ask around about Blaine, I head for Katherine's shop in the slums.  "I'm looking for a guy named Blaine. Seen him around?" "Mmm... maybe, maybe. What's it worth to you?" "Got some charons here I'm looking to spend. What's your price?" "Gimme a hundred of those and I'll tell you where to find him."You can haggle her down to 50 but we're not there yet or that hard up for cash. "Fine, here you go." Give her 100 stygian coins. "Look for him in the Lower Underrail, near SGS. He got his shop of sorts in the under-passage there. Not everyone can get in, though. You gonna have to ring the intercom two times quickly, once long and then two times quickly again. Dig that? Two quick, one long, two quick and you in."And that is what lies on the other side of that intercom door in the service tunnels, so that's where we're headed next. "I dig. Thanks, sis." We sell her the laser pistol we picked up, it's worth more than all the money she has.  I decide to boat back to SGS.  Home sweet home.  I swing by Big Bret to pick up some more nets and the boots blueprint.  I grab some crafting supplies from Pasquale. I head up to Ethan to talk more about Temporal Manipulation as we're getting close to picking up a skill.  "What can you tell me about Temporal Manipulation?" "Temporal Manipulation, it is a psionic discipline that allows one to manipulate time in many different ways: accelerate it, decelerate it, suspend it, reverse it... But before you get your hopes up too much, the effects are on a local level, meaning that one's reshaping - or even disfigurement - of the structure of the Universe will not have large-scale consequences, but will rather only affect a small, small part of spacetime, just the very part that is being manipulated." "I understand if you're finding this difficult to comprehend. It's not... an accessible subject, really. Regardless, it is an immensely powerful discipline in the right hands but is sadly underused. You should consider yourself lucky." "Why is Temporal Manipulation so underused?" "Well, it is..." He stops. He peers inquisitively in your eyes, smiling warmly before pointing his finger at you. "Actually... I would like to hear what you think is the reason. I'm just curious."The answer is obvious really. "It's only for attractive people?" "Mmm... If that is the deciding factor, then I would be seeking you to teach me Temporal Manipulation." He smiles. "But then again, attractive people aren't as rare as those who practice temporal manipulation, so I'm afraid your answer is not correct. But good try nonetheless; it is a difficult question." "To become a master temporal manipulator, one needs time: time to manipulate, time to practice, time to experience. The first one: It is in the very core of our universe - spacetime. We manipulate the temporal, but for spacetime to remain in balance the spatial must react. The second one: As with any skill, one needs to extensively train develop his abilities in order to become proficient at them; this takes time to practice, but one is also practicing on time itself. But the third point, that is the most important one, the thing that sets Temporal Manipulation apart from other psi disciplines." "Temporal Manipulation, on its most basic level, does not possess the destructive power of other disciplines. No pyrokinetic fireballs or accelerated ice shards, no ways to drive your enemies derailed, cause them to fight each other or against the horrors plucked out of their very own minds. Manipulating time... requires time - requires temporal experience. With other disciplines, even if one doesn't understand their meaning one can achieve much through simply understanding the mechanics; with Temporal Manipulation, mechanics only have meaning if you understand the passage of time." "It is something one might not be - in fact, definitely cannot be - able to truly understand without sufficient experience. And that comes when one has just the right amount of time available to him. Most have plenty, too much - and that is why they waste it. Those who don't - they chase it, but they might have plenty available to chase. Now those who have experienced it running out - those realize its true value." "You're implying that it takes an old person to be a good manipulator, yet you're looking pretty drat young." "I am more than just young..." He smiles. "but that is, perhaps, beside the point." "I do look young, yes, but I have experience. I may be one of the best - which, I admit, doesn't say nuch considering there aren't many of us out there but I still have a life ahead of me to truly acquire the experience I told you about. However, I have been taught by the best, you see, yes, yes: Arthur Kain, my mentor and a true master of Temporal Manipulation, has helped me... understand certain important things much earlier than I normally would. But that is a whole other story." "Tell me more about Arthur Kain, your mentor." "Perhaps some other time. It is a long story and... I you know, I don't feel like telling it right now."I don't believe Arthur Kain is actually a character in this game. Although Ethan might have more to say about this after the early game is over, maybe. He nods. "Some other time." "I'd like to learn some abilities." "Certainly." He smiles. "And not only that, but since this is your first time I will teach you one ability completely free of charge. Any one - but only one. I still have to eat like everyone else, you understand"I think Ethan only does this for you if you're a woman, otherwise you have to pay for anything he teaches. "I can teach you temporal distortion, limited temporal increment and psycho-temporal dilation."The two disciplines of his we will want are Limited Temporal Increment (LTI) and Psyho-temporal dilation. Temporal distortion is one of the few attacking Temporal Manipulation abilities, and is more useful to a psi mage than us. "Tell me about psycho-temporal dilation." [Requires: Temporal Manipulation 25] "Psycho-temporal effects allow one to manipulate the passage of time for the targeted object relative to everything else, no matter their actual mass or movement velocity. Psycho-temporal dilation causes the target to be slowed down, while there is also psycho-temporal contraction which does exactly the opposite, but is a more advanced ability to learn and master." "I will teach you only how to dilate time, but even that is a powerful ability on its own." "However, I don't think you're quite ready for that yet. We should try again at a later time."We'll be able to pick this up next level. "I have to go." We make our way back to the service tunnels.  Thankfully human enemies don't respawn, so we're perfectly safe down here.  And we arrive at the intercom again.  Ring twice short, once long and twice short again.The electronic door unlocks.  And there is Blaine.  "Why do you keep a shop down here? Do you even get any customers?" "My customers know how to find me. A lot of them also prefer the privacy these tunnels offer when they come to collect their... 'special orders.'" "What kind of 'special orders' do you deal in?" "All sort of... stuff that might be hard to acquire reason or the other. Why do you ask?"Once we get our mercantile up, we'll be able to expand Blaine's already pretty good inventory. "No reason." "No reason..." "Would you happen to have an Armadillo class drill rotor circuit board by any chance?" "No."Dang, guess we gotta go into depot A. "I'd advise you to ask around Junkyard, but I assume you've already done that. Can't help you." "Actually, I came here to ask you a question about the Old Junkyard." "Is that so? I don't deal in information usually. That business is messy. Besides, there are others who do that kind of thing much better." "But I'm curious... why'd you come to me with this?" "Silas told me to find you. He figures you're the most qualified person to help us figure our little problem out." For a moment you thought you noticed a smile on his face, but it could've been simply due to the lighting. "That's very amusin'. Silas askin' for my help." "Funny, some years back I wouldn't even have considered talkin' to you Eels with nothin' but bullets... but a lot has changed since. Very well, ask your question." "Is there a way into the Scrappers HQ from the Old Junkyard other than the main gate?" "I'll be damned. Did the old dirty eel finally muster up courage to go after the Scrappers?" "Something like that, yeah." "Well in that case, I'll give you this one for free. Figure if you guys can pull it off, that will rid me of my problem with Eddy." "There ain't any other ways to get in there right now, but if being stealthy about it is not what you're lookin' for here, then I think I know a way for you to clear the existin' entrance." "You see, girl, back in the days when Depot A, as the Old Junkyard was called back then, was the main thing, Depot B, which is now the Scrappers HQ, was just a little forward outpost. It wasn't connected to the Underrail's ventilation system directly, but rather through Depot A." "So when the ceilin' started to crumble - figuratively - with the mutagen and whatnot, the survivors from Depot B set up explosives and collapsed all the vents because they feared the mutagen might've been airborne in nature." "So you see if you were to plant enough explosives there in the southernmost part of that cavern, it could collapse the gate above and all the defenses the Scrappers might have stacked up there. And there you go - a brand new entrance." "Wouldn't that also open the passage for mutants as well?" "I guess it would. It is possible. But you could use that to your advantage as well. Let them deal with the muties while you also attack them from the front." "Whatever the case may be, that's all I got for you. Take it or leave it." "Let me see what you got for sale." We pick up the blueprints for Tabi Boots from Blaine, I think you can buy these in SGS sometimes, but Blaine always sells them.  The main advantage of Blaine's shop is he often sells really good quality materials. Which may well come in handy once we get our crafting skills to decent levels.  Next time, we'll explore a bit of the area some more. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Jan 10, 2023 |
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Chapter 11 - Beneath the Embassy Anyway I erroneously thought at this point that I could carve a path back to the Junkyard US embassy from up here. But I misremembered where it was located. But I have a small explore south of SGS.  The south entrance has a few guards and a turret posted there.  It eventually turns into a t-intersection.  We head down the east past into this small area.  Towards the back are three members of the Ironhead gang camping out. Ironhead isn't spelt without an e at the end so you know they don't mean business. Ironhead's specialize in heavy firepower, sledgehammers, and often wear unique metal helmets. These guys are pretty tough at this point, but I think we can take them.  We make use of our silent attacks to ambush the smasher behind the shipping crate.  Then sneak up on the remaining two guys.  Kill one with a grenade.  And punch the remaining survivor to death.  There's an old train schedule in a barrel nearby.  In the small storage building nearby is the last piece of protectorate propaganda we can utilize.  We make our way back to the t-intersection and head south this time.  We explore this area thoroughly.  Not much around but this storage room.  And the odd pack of rathounds.  In the west wall is an entrance into the upper caves.  The storage room has a dead scavenger inside.  More propaganda upon his person.  I'm feeling a little reckless, so I decide to have a look around the upper caves.  There's some bones and oinking coming from nearby.  We stumble upon our first pig enemy. Pigs aren't too difficult to deal with, although they do tend to come in packs.  They also tend to have warthogs with them. They're much more dangerous.  This one evades my throwing net.  And it hits me pretty severely. The main thing to avoid with warthogs, is to prevent them from have a direct path to you. They have a tendency to charge, and this can stun you if they manage to hit you.  We get some intestines and a decent piece of pig leather. Pig leather armor provides you with an extra point of constitution, these might make a decent pair of combat gloves for us potentially.  We find some cave ear fungus which we can process into cave ear poison. This makes enemies more vulnerable to biological damage and lowers perception by 5. So it's useful against snipers and if you're a chemical pistol kind of person.  We stumble on a whole nest of swine.  A grenade sorts out the majority of them.  The bloody warthog resists our taser attack.  And then follows that by also evading our net throw. Sigh. We manage to finish him off though.  I extract some blood from the hearts I've been carrying around with me.  One of the pigs drops the pig oddity, the fluorescent snout. Note that warthog's have their own unique oddity which we haven't found yet. The snout brings us to level 8!  Another level that is a multiple of 4 means we get another free attribute point, we put it into our strength score.  We finally get our Temporal Manipulation to an effective 25, which is a little lower than our base skill because of our poor will.  The reason we take strength this time is so we can then take the Bone Breaker feat. This will make our criticals break ribs if we deal 4% of the maximal health of a target. They will then receive 25% more damage from any subsequent hit. More damage is always very welcome, although this will not work if the enemy has no ribs to break.  And we find yet another trilobite fossil.  The caves continue on north.  We're reaching a pretty dangerous area and we're getting a bit side tracked so we won't stick around here for long, I'm not entirely sure how deeper we can actually go before we'll hit more rubble.  We'll just check what's in this gated off area and leave.  Inside is another encyclopedia fragment.  With that we head back the way we came.  Home sweet home. We go back to Ethan to finally start taking advantage of our psi abilities.  "I'd like to learn some abilities." "Certainly." He smiles. "I can teach you temporal distortion, limited temporal increment and psycho-temporal dilation." "Tell me about psycho-temporal dilation." [Requires: Temporal Manipulation 25]We've already heard this spiel so I'll skip ahead. "I usually charge more, but for you I'll make it... one hundred stygian coins to teach you this ability. But since we're in SGS... I'll accept two hundred and fifty credits as well. Whichever you have. Or you could use that freebie." "I'd like to learn this one for free." "Certainly. Now, if you don't mind, I propose we move to somewhere where we you can train in... relative peace and quiet. We don't want to be disturbed, right?" "We could use my room."You get to choose to either learn this in one of the vid rooms or your private quarters. It's just personal preference I guess. "Perfect." "Ladies first." Lead the way.  Well I don't know if it's implied that we slept with him or not, but whatever.  We finally have our first psi ability! It's basically a slow spell. Comes in handy in the right situation. Especially against hard hitting tough enemies you want to keep at arms length.  We use the insect saliva, anticoagulants, blood and syringes we've accumulated to make some health hypos. You get 2 every time you make them. Some of the ingredients for this are annoyingly rare to find in the wild, but medical merchants will usually have them on hand.  We also make ourselves some ninja tabi boots out of some nice black we've been hanging onto. This are generally better and stealthier than other kinds of tabi boots, but they make you even more vulnerable to melee crits, so take care.  Back to trash mountain with us.  We bring our news to Silas.  "About that Blaine guy..." "Any news? Did you find him?" "Yeah I found him and he told me something that could help us." "Excellent. So what did you learn?" Tell him about the cavern beneath the gate. "Hmm... it ain't quite what I was expectin', but this could work. Yeah, yeah. I'll have Colton prepare the explosives, but in the meantime I got another job for you." "I'll be straight with you, Henrietta. The reason I picked you for this ain't because of your competence, though you proved you got plenty of that, but because of your allegiance." "The Scrappers got about the same manpower as we do, so if we're to take them down we're gonna need a bit of outsidehelp. If you could convince your leaders at SGS to aid us in this, we could make it profitable for them in the long run." "I'd prefer us to have SGS on our side here, but if you think it ain't gonna work out, you could also try talkin' with the Protectorate. I'm sure they'd be happy to see us and the Scrappers fight each other." "Any way you look at it, we're gonna need someone to help us get this done. Let me know if you manage to pull somethin' off there."This is as far as we can go with the Black Eels before we have to pick a side. If we do side with the Eels we then further have to choose between getting SGS' help or the Protectorate to weigh in. This will have strong game ending consequences for Junkyard. If we want to let SGS support the Eels we will need to wait till after Depot A is dealt with, because we will need to use our persuasion to sway the council otherwise.  Anyway there's a few more tasks we can do yet. We run into that Commoner again.  "Dangerous stuff's about to go down, so if you're comin', come well prepared." "What is this about?" "That's all I know." "Got it. Thanks for the info."Abram's next task is ready to go.  We make our way west of Junkyards entrance.  A new entrance has opened up to the north of this location.  We stumble upon Abram near a ladder heading downwards.  There's a fossil in the nearby rubble.  "Yeah, go on." "This hole that we dug up..." wheeze "will lead you to the ventilation system..." wheeze "of the Union embassy lower level." "Among other things..." wheeze "this area also serves as a Protectorate prison. I need you..." wheeze "to liberate a prisoner."So this is one of the more stealth oriented missions in this game. "Her name is Maura." He coughs. "As far I as know..." wheeze "she is the only prisoner there, but..." i]wheeze[/i] "I cannot be sure."You can get away with having 0 stealth and just purchasing and or making some decent quality stealth equipment and that will be sufficient to get you through this place, although you could probably get away with just careful timing around guard patrols. "You will encounter..." wheeze "moderate to heavy resistance down there. I would prefer if y-" coughs... "if you could liberate her with no casualties on either side..." wheeze "but if you do engage in conflict..." wheeze "make sure you leave no witnesses."Yeah, if anyone catches us down there and lives to tell about it, we're going to piss of a very powerful faction. So we need to be careful, or so reckless that nobody lives. "You do not want to find yourself..." wheeze "on the Protectorate's most wanted list." "So..." wheeze "what do you say?" "I'll do it." "You may descend the ladder..." wheeze "when ready."We're pretty well equipped that we don't need to make any real preparations.  So we'll just make our way inside.  The ladder leads to a narrow passage.  We plops us out inside the ventilation system of the lower embassy.  There's an already opened vent, that leads to small storage closet.  There's a number of propaganda oddities in this place, but we're long past the need for them.  Some nice black cloth for us too.  We head back into the vents and get a good look of the area.You can just make out the blue bar underneath the guards health at the top of the screen. That means that this guy has an energy shield on his. We haven't needed to worry about those yet, and I won't go into great detail just now, but they're an extra complication when dealing with human enemies. We will also want to acquire our own energy shield when the time comes, they greatly improve your survivability for very little cost. It is technically possible to obtain an energy shield in the early game but they're pretty rare, or else on pretty dangerous enemies, like the guards in this area. It's not likely to happen but we may potentially find one or have enough materials and skill to make our own before we finish Depot A.  There's a lone guard hanging out in front of some security monitors. The vent is position too close to him for us to safely engage, as there's a small cool down between certain actions before you can enter combat, like leaving a vent shaft. He'll spot us before that cool down ends and he's got good initiative. The combat cool down is annoying but I'm assuming its there to stop people from breaking the game with turn based combat exploits.  There's another vent on the opposite side of the room, we can crawl out at a safe distance here.  In the locker at the end of the room is some keys to some of the prison cells. Useful if you come here without any lockpicking skill.  We decide to kill this guy, he's actually pretty tough to kill, but we can do it.  Since my punches have a chance to daze, we can reliably hit him enough times in one round before he's incapacitated and then wait till next turn. As long as he's incapacitated, he can't call out for help between rounds, and we just keep pummeling him.  Combat barks don't count as calling out for help. This can lead to much hilarity if you stealth kill people with the psi ability neural overload, which is also stealthy, and they just clutch their heads and scream at the top of their lungs and nobody seems to notice.  A lovely crit puts him down our of his misery.  He's got some dog tags on him, this is nice oddity to pickpocket off of protectorate early on if you have the means to, it saves having to fight them directly.  He also has another key on his person.  We need to get into a different vent system, and this is best place to do that from.  We climb out into the hallway between the guard patrols and narrowly avoid a camera going red.  The cell room leads to a vent that takes us up to a small medical room.  More keys and propaganda.  In the back is a physician doing some autopsies on some mutants, what exactly is the protectorate up to here?  Turns out you can actually talk to the guy, but we can't persuade him of anything. If we don't have the ability to open vents, we can find some biotechnicians clothes and body bag to smuggle Maura out of the building that way. We will reload.  We make our way to cell one via the vents.  There another encyclopedia fragment in here.  And Maura is in the cell in here, you need to unlock the cage in order to make an escape plan with her.  "Are you Maura?" "Is this some kind of a trick?" "You already know who I am." "Actually, I do not. I'm not allied with your jailors. I broke into this place." "Yes, I am Maura." "I'm here to bust you out." "Why... Who are you?" "I've been hired to get you out of here and that's all you need to know. You want out or not?"I wish we knew what for... but we aren't paid to ask questions. "Yes... of course I do. How do we get out of here...?" "Don't tell me you expect us to... just walk outta the front gate?"If you've opened the vent in this room you can just get her to escape herself, it's the easiest way to finish this. "I've unlocked your cell and opened the ventilation shaft. In the vents you'll find a crack that leads up into the caves." "I like the sound of that. Should work." Wait for her to leave. And that's all there is to it.  Abram will be pleased with us.  "Our business..." wheeze "has concluded for now..." wheeze. "I will be leaving..." wheeze "for Core City quite soon. If you..." wheeze "happen to be interested in doing more business, find me there. So far you..." wheeze "haven't disappointed. I will keep my eye on you..." wheeze "Henrietta of SGS." "How do you know so much about me?" He just wheezes through his mask, saying nothing.Abram refuses to answer any questions we have for him. We will want to track him down once we get the chance to, if only to figure out what on earth his deal is.  He paid us 1000 charons too, and we definitely want more paydays like that!  We're competent enough to tackle the siphoner pools now, so let's head up there.  Why is this relatively small place called the siphoner pools you ask?  Well, for demonstration purposes, while we remain in stealth, we'll just place a bear trap on the floor here.  And if we leave stealth an amphibious creature leaps out of the pool and into the bear trap.  So these are siphoners. They're ambush predators, so it's worth taking care whenever you're near open bodies of water. They're pretty quick and tend to open with a head butt which can daze you. They will then lick you with their tongues, which can hit you with their anticoagulant effect. This makes you more vulnerable to bleeding effects. Once they've stacked that on you good and proper, or if their health starts to get too low, they'll instead impale you with their tongue and start sucking your blood, which both hurts a lot more if you're anti-coagulated and it will greatly heal the siphoner. They're also a little bit hardier than a lot of the animals we've faced so far. So I like to keep them good and pinned down when I fight them at this stage.  They also drop their tongues, which you can extract anticoagulant from, used in a lot healing recipes, it's a pretty limiting reagent if you only harvest it naturally.  Up ahead I place down a landmine.  As there are two siphoners that jump out at this spot.  We're now in a good spot to kite them into a bottle neck.  Which makes it easier to fight them one at a time.  They go down nice and easy.  There's another one in the far end over here.  We dispatch him with using similar tactics.  This one has a siphoner oddity on it, the Heart-Shaped Siphoner Marking.  It also had a pretty decent quality piece of siphoner leather too. This is going to come in real handy real soon.  There's an Obsidian Shard oddity found here, we could have found more of these earlier if we were agile enough.  I take out the last of the siphoners. There's also some cave poppies growing here if you need to chase the dragon.  At this point I decide to do some fishing.  Fishing is simple, you place your rod.  You wait till the rod starts twitching.  And you click on the rod, and a calculation is made to see if you catch a fish or not. The calculation is largely dependent on your dexterity, so we should be pretty good at catching fish. What we catch is probability dependent and will also depend on where we decide to fish. Here we caught a blue eel. Different fish can contain hard to find crafting ingredients that you can extract from them. Blue eels are pretty common and are thus an excellent source of Organic Gel Electrolyte, which you need for a number of advanced drug recipes.  I'm not quite ready to start the Southern tour, the actual reason I decided to go fishing in the siphoner pools, is that there is a very well hidden quest we can do here. If we simply cast our rod at this particular spot in this area.  We can fish up a damaged necklace. I have no idea how you're supposed to know how to do this, as you're likely to miss it if you just fish anywhere in this place. Maybe it comes up as a rumor at Kareem's bar or something I dunno.  We'll deal with the necklace shortly, first there's some annoying enemies I want to deal with first.  There's a small shack west of the entrance to junkyard with two thugs in it.  And a third crossbow thug off to the side.  The crossbow thug tends to stun you with shock bolts, which can leave you extremely vulnerable, especially with two other guys in the area. They're a very annoying combo. If we were the tanking sort of character, you'd want to have 10 Constitution and not just for the health. That lets you pick up a feat called Thick Skull, which reduces all stun attacks to milder form where you can still act, but with a disadvantage, and makes fights against enemies that use lots of dirty tricks a lot more manageable. You still need to have a lot of healing items about you and be morphined up to the gills a lot of the time too, but well that's a tank build for you.  But we've got the equipment to keep them from being a problem at this stage.  The crossbow thug has something very nice on them. A set of mutated dog leather armor. If we don't get the means to craft something nice out of the siphoner leather, this armor would be a fantastic second. Both this and siphoner leather proved incredible resistance to acid, which is a pretty common type of damage you come across in this game. One we will be come very familiar with all too soon.  One of them has a nice pair of shock gloves. They're probably worse than our current gloves and they don't have a great battery life but an alternative type of damage never hurts.  There's also a marked card deck oddity on the shelf in here too.  Back we go to the corrugated refuse utopia.  We replenish our bear traps.  And pick up some serrated blades, to be used to eventually make some nice combat gloves.  We bring the necklace we found to Katherine.  "Hey, Katherine, do you know what this is?" Show her the damaged necklace. "Lemme see." She inspects the necklace "Hmmmm... I've... yeah, I've seen these before. It's one of them tracker-emitter necklaces. Folks that wanted to make sure not to lose each other in Underrail - like scavengers, for example - used to make these." "This one seems to be one part of a pair. It's basically both a receiver and an emitter so either necklace of the pair can be used to track the other one."She pauses, taking a look at the necklace again. "Not any more, obviously, since the thing is broken." "Can you repair it?" "The receiver... possibly. But I doubt it's gonna be workin' as well as it used to. I mean... that's the way things are. Emitter is way beyond repair, though. All in all, the fixint would cost you fifteen charons. Interested?" "Sure, here's fifteen." Give her 15 stygian coins "Alright, lemme see what I can do."This is actually the very first time I've ever done this quest. I both barely knew of it, and kept on forgetting to do it when I did.   "No luck with the emitter component, but perhaps that's for the best. You don't know who might be, heh, holdin' the other receiver, if you dig." So now we have a functioning Tracker necklace. If we use it around Junkyard it will just tell us we have no signal.  If we take it SGS however.  We can slowly pinpoint the origin of the signal.  We could also take it to Ezra and he'll tell us whose it belongs to, but you'll end up getting less experience for finishing the quest this way if you do that.  It seems to be coming from Arlene.  "Do you know what this is?" Show her the necklace. "Wh--... Where did you get this?" "I fished it out near Junkyard." Arlene pauses for a moment and sighs deeply. "This used to belong to my late husband Redd. We each had one of these... She pulls out her necklace from beneath her shirt. He commissioned them from Ezra... said we'd never lose each other as long as we have them." "What happened?" "He was killed in the Mushroom Cove during the war with the Omega Station. Jonas, who witnessed it, said he took a round to the chest and fell into the water." "Even though I wasn't there, I instantly knew something was wrong when I could no longer read his signal. We never found his body." "Can I have his amulet back?" "Sure, here you go."We could bilk 100 credits out of here but that seems mean. Also 100 SGS credits would barely cover rent if one of the other players has a house on Whitechapel. "Thank you."And that's all for now.  Next time, we'll figure out what happened to the Mushroom Cove Scavenger. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Jan 10, 2023 |
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Jan 10, 2023 02:52
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Wow, had no idea that quest was a thing. Thanks for taking the time to showcase it!
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Jan 10, 2023 19:54
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Same, never heard of this quest. Amount of content in Underrail is amazing and it mostly avoids wearing player off with tons of trashmobs (looking at you Pathfinder/Pillars of Eternity). Oddity XP also prevents being punished for avoiding combat.
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Jan 10, 2023 21:28
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Chapter 12 - Kick the Burrowers Nest Right, let's get this last task taken care of, and then we can finally see about tackling Depot A.  Off to the dump.  I continue to make money selling food to Kareem.  We then head out west of Junkyard once again.  Then south from there into a new area of the lower caves.  It's a lot like much of the rest of the caves, although there isn't any hostiles around here.  To the east is a small exit screen that will take us to that trapdoor we spied through a peephole many updates ago.  There's two empty lockers in this old shed, one of them is even locked.  To the west of the this area is a man called Cliff, who is slowly bleeding to death. He is standing next to a trapdoor. We decide, against our better judgement go down there. We will avoid talking to Cliff because he is not in a trusting mood and will attack us if we can't calm him down. Assuming you're able to, he tells you that he is severely hurt and is bleeding out. Him and his girlfriend, Jenny are scavengers and they went exploring down this trapdoor and discovered the place was infested with burrowers. Jenny and Cliff got separated and he wants us to find her. The problem is that unless you have the Doctor feat or the rare DLC introduced coagulation shot, Cliff will rapidly bleed to death shortly after you speak to him. There is no way to administer healing to another character that I know of. We could still finish the quest if he died but if we sneak past him instead, and rescue Jenny first, then they will both live. I think this is kind of a bug, but whatever, that is what I chose to do.  It's all dark and crumbly down here.  And there are burrower spawn skittering about. They aren't too big of an issue. They have a little bit of damage protection at 15%/3, which we can easily overcome and they don't hit very hard. If you have a decent medium sized piece of armor they probably can't hit you at all. Sadly this is not the case for us, and we get critted more often too, but we can take what they dish out. Their main difficulty is that there is often several of them around and they move quick and thus hit you many times in one round. They are also a warning that their are fully grown burrowers about the place.  We stealth our way into the nearby ducts.  The vents of this place are crawling with rathounds, including alphas. But at low levels, this is probably the safest way to get around this place.  We can see there are burrower eggs all over this location. Thankfully these eggs are just decoration, although I am disappointed you can't smash them all.  We drop out into a small bedroom.  And pick up another strange comm device.  Around the corner to the right, I stumble upon a very unfortunate situation. We finally meet our first live burrowers. Burrowers are bad news, especially at very low levels. Their hard carapace's mean they've got a pretty substantial mechanical protection of 30%/10 (for combat glove this means 42%/14). With our gloves we can barely dent them at this point. They also have some thermal resistance to at 10%/5 so our grenade will be slightly worse against them.  Our MkIII's will kill the spawn and do hurt the burrowers, but not reliably enough to fight them in large groups.  It feels like at this particular point that we're doing okay though. We're not in the best position but we seem to be holding our own.  I can also keep the burrowers busy with a flashbang too.  Whilst the little ones nibble at my feet.  But then the burrowers start to get their own attacks in by spitting thorns at us. Their damage is mechanical and the 12-20 damage and that will cut right through our pathetic leather armor protection scores.  Assuming they do damage you, they also poison you. Burrower poison, as we already know, will add biological damage to you every turn. Note that whilst poison damage is biological in nature, we can't just slap on a gas mask to resist it. Seems obvious, but its worth pointing out.  If you get attacked multiple times in one turn, the poison can be stacked up to five times. Each stack adds another 7 damage you'll receive each turn. If you have no antidote on you, you've already used a hypo, and the fight is still ongoing, this will probably kill you in very short order. At this point I also realize that my fireworks display has drawn every burrower on the map to my location.  As well as this, every time a Burrower starts its turn it was dig at the ground and lay an egg. If this egg is not destroyed in the next turn, it will hatch into another burrower spawn. In short, gently caress burrowers.  We've put ourselves into a bad position we can't easily get out of.  We use our Psycho-temporal Dilation to slow down the advance of the burrowers, but it's no use So we reload, and sneak out of the place, to return at a later date.  I personally wouldn't try to mess with Burrowers this early on normally anyway. I tend to at least finish up the early game before I'd consider myself capable enough to try out this location.  So instead we return to do what we originally came here for.  To find out what befell the mushroom cove scavenger.  So as I've mentioned previously, this mission is one of the most dynamic in the whole game. It can play very differently between each playthrough.  We find the first ingredient to make an energy shield. We're not far off having the skill to make it either.  There is also some tornado crossbow parts that are worth a decent chunk of money.  In some playthroughs the entrance to this place puts you on the complete opposite side of the map.  Sometimes the map is full of mind controlled slaves who will stop fighting you if you defeat their master, Mr Dom.  Sometimes, the location is riddled with bear traps, guard dogs, a sub boss called Slick, and some really nasty pit bulls. All under the command of a guy called Shroomseed.  Sometimes this area is full of robots, including a very dangerous one we haven't met yet, all controlled by the man known only as the Botsmith.  Sometimes this place is crawling with mutants, toxic gas and the shambling failed experiments of someone called Dr. Oddioathe.  It can also be the hideout of a cabal of fire cultists who all use metathermics and are led by a pyromaniac name Alev.  Ooh, 13 extra batteries is a great find!  But in our case, we've gotten a fairly benign one this time round. Mostly the place is covered in mines. Annoying, but we can surprisingly spot them in here for some reason. There are also some live security cameras, which don't cause much trouble, since there are no enemies to hunt us down to speak of.  We find a medium frequency shield modulator, another important component in crafting energy shields. They can come in low, medium and high frequencies, which determines the resistance of the shield against different weapon velocities. I will explain in more detail once we actually obtain a shield.  Once we shut the power off on this wall, this place is now a total cakewalk. In all events, it unlocks all the electronically sealed doors.  But for us, the other big danger is that this place is full of gun turrets. Shutting off the power, turns them all off. So apart from the mines everywhere, we're completely safe.  We can find a burrower that was crushed in half by some blast doors. The scene is well illuminated because there was a landmine in front of it that I stood on.  Outside, we see that we're actually on a level above, you can occasionally look down below in this place and there's a few pipes sticking out of walls that you can leap onto if you're agile enough.  We decide to check out the vents in this place.  The vents here can be very dangerous, sometimes there's lots of traps, or its flooded with liquid nitrogen, or there's small exploding kamikaze robots in here. For us though, the vents are completely empty, I cannot believe our luck.  There wasn't anything to be found in those vents so we keep exploring the area, sampling the land mines as we find them.  This store room had some steel spikes in it, which we could use to make some better gloves at some point, potentially.  There's also a galvanic tactical vest in here too, these mostly give good mechanical and electrical protection. We may want to make ourselves one of these, for the electricity protection at some point. Just in case.  These vents can lead us to some new places.  Crawling all the way north and to the west.  There's a ladder poking downwards.  That leads us to a dead end.  Inside is a small room, that I think has a back exit if you're perceptive enough.  We find a nice plasma core.  Some advanced Electronic repair kits.  And two decent quality Temporal Manipulation modulators that we could use to make us a psi headband that will enhance our Temporal psi abilities if we ever felt the need too.  There's also an advanced mechanical repair kit.  Another Encyclopedia fragment.  And an incendiary blob trap, for the chemicals that just burn.  Back where we were before, we head up to where we saw that turret.  There's an open trapdoor at the back.  We can peek down it to see the coast looks clear.  Down here is a walkway over some nasty looking sewage water. We avoid going along the walkways as much as possible as the place is heavily mined.  More goodies to loot.  Like a good balaclava. The brown boots we're finding are pig leather boots, they give minor mechanical protection and 1 point of constitution.  We also find the blue print for incendiary bullets, the blue colour of the item means that its uncommon, I think. This allows you to add some extra fire damage to your guns.  Inside this monitoring room we check out some nearby crates.  We find three whole psi mentors. These are the other, and in some cases the only way, of learning new psi abilities. As long as you meet the prerequisite psi skill level, you just use it and you have a new psi ability to play with. Annoyingly the first is one we find we just spent money to learn.  We also find frighten, a thought control ability which lets you inflict fear on an enemy that is good for crowd control.  And pyrokinesis, which is just a fireball spell. Does area of effect fire damage, you can use feats to make it set things on fire too.  There's a lot of keys in this place, I think this one leads to the boss.  We climb into yet another vent.  This leads us all the way to the back of the building.  Allowing us to circumvent these blast doors, if you're very strong you can just force the doors open with you bare hands and proceed that way.  We also find a pile of old explosives. I believe the description of what is down this grate changes depending on how this place generates too.  In the back we meet our adversary of this place, Professor Edison. He's standing near another thankfully deactivated turret.  Edison is no challenge to us whatsoever. This was by far the easiest of the different possibilities this place can generate.  On him was yet another rusty key.  On the shelves we find some Stable Neural Amplifiers. You can add these to a psionic head band craft to increase the critical damage you can do with psi abilities. Pretty nice. Probably a must have to psi mages.  We find a mining helmet, a cool little piece of protective headwear that also lets you have a head lamp, and increases your crit protection. A bit bulky for our tastes though.  There is also another loaded dice oddity.  And the reason we came in here for, the missing ring on that belonged the scavenger.  There is also a blueprint to make Jacketed Hollow Point rounds. These sacrifice armor penetration potential in exchange for greater damage. So they work extremely well against the unarmored targets and much worse against well armored targets.  We do some quick mine sweeping with our mkI grenades.  There's a small building off in the south east corner of this map with a ladder going up.  It leads to the surveillance room with a bunch of goodies about the place.  Lots of guns and ammo.  A master keycard that's probably obsolete for us at this stage.  An Old Data Medium oddity.  And some gas grenade blueprints, we could probably make use of these. Although I've never really used them much myself personally.  Some more ammo supplies  There's a broken footbridge leading back to exit that the agile can leap across.  On the the lower level, on the opposite side of all the railings, is a ladder. I do believe this goes nowhere, but it would be the entrance to this place on some playthroughs.  That's all there is to see here.  We head back to junk yard to track down the inheritor of the ring we found.  It will be this gentleman here.  "Hey, man." He glances at you, then looks back at his brew. From his respirator seeps a cold response. "Leave me alone." "Do you recognize this?" Show him the gold ring. Its sparkle is mirrored in his eyes. "That ring..." He lifts his head, and his whole figure suddenly appears larger. "Where did you find this?" "In a water treatment plant south of here." "It's my father's ring, but it's been worn by my--" He pauses. "..my dead brother. I must have it." He appears even larger now. The casted shadows must be playing tricks on your eyes. The descriptions in this dialogue seem a little clunky. I reckon they hired better translators and or writers as they made more of this game. The writing does improve significantly. So far it's mostly just functional and but off at times. "I killed a madman who's taken the life of your sibling in a terrible way..." He remains silent. "I ask for nothing. Here's the ring." Give him the gold ring.You can ask him for money for it, and he will happily give you some, but we'll be kind. Seems like there isn't a lot of kindness in this world. The ring rests on his palm, and he stares at it with teary eyes. "Thank you for this." "Can I ask you a few questions about Joshua?" He removes his respirator and takes a sip of his nowlukewarm brew. "Go ahead." "That ring. You mentioned it was your father's, yet itbears your sibling's initials." He takes a moment to respond. "They are the same. Ourfather's name was Jasper. Jasper Royce." "He was a scavenger too... and he gave this to Joshua on hisdeathbed." "I'll be leaving now." He nods and takes a sip of his brew, then stares at the gold ring in whose reflection you see a dancing flame - and many prying eyes around, of which he is as oblivious. Then he finishes the brew, grabs his spade - and walks away. Kind of a bit anticlimactic and confusing towards the end there, but that was the mushroom cove scavenger quest, one of the most dynamic quests in this game. This game is full of cool little random touches like this.  At this point it seems like a good idea to take on Depot A.  The worm hole entrance is just in this shack here.  Down this trapdoor.  There is a pneumatic hammer which we could use to make a more powerful fist weapon if we so wanted.   Here we meet Hugh the guardian of the worm hole.  "Where will this tunnel take me?" "Destination: Hell, sister. Also known as 'Depot A.'" "I'll be going now." We could start Depot A right this second, but we're so close to leveling up one more time and gently caress it, I'm feeling suicidal, let's go save Jenny.  We pick up some insecticide.  Let's be more clever about this, this time.  We swing around to the south, towards this explosive barrel.  There's only a lone Burrower back here, if you don't count all the spawn about it.  We don't do a lot of damage to these things, but we can still keep it locked down with a taser for a bit.  I switch to my shock gloves, because they do hit a little more reliably, since burrowers have no electricity resistance, although the batteries don't last long on these ones. You can also notice that shock weapons will tend to propagate their attacks into nearby enemies, so we're also hitting all the burrower spawn around us too.  We can also use a flashbang when the stun wears off to buy us more time.  We take it out with one last crit.  And immediately get lucky, we find the Burrower Ocarina oddity.  This puts us into the next level. We also find a burrower poison gland that Quinton's always raving about. You can refine these into burrower poison, that we can coat on darts, bolts, traps, possibly any melee weapon too.  We mostly boost our tailoring so we can make use of that siphoner leather, one more level and we can stop raising chemistry so dramatically too.  The remaining spawn in this area proved to be a nuisance. but a manageable nuisance.  There's another old train schedule back here too.  The rest of this place is just a dead end, so we head back to the ladder.  And from there, north towards a t-intersection.  We swing left, stealth killing any spawn we come across.  In the back is, surprise surprise, more burrowers.  We're reasonably okay at fighting them one at a time at the very least. Although barely. Combat gloves aren't great at hitting armored things and as armor resistances are 140% more effective against them, so that means we have to hit for at least 15 mechanical damage to hit a burrower. We definitely need some better gloves soon.  We're in bad shape, but there's no reinforcements coming at least.  That last burrower laid an egg that we immediately smash.  We find another encyclopedia fragment back here.  Uh oh, there was a mine in this room. Which means that this blast will likely draw every remaining burrower straight to us.  The spawns are the first to arrive.  Which we can take on no problem. We're not great at hitting them, through accuracy alone, but you don't need to him them that often to kill them thankfully. We are able to use that room as a bit of a resting spot. If things get too dicey, we can just slam the door shut and wait. Only humans can open doors. There's also a vent in that room as well, so we could always sneak out if the population outside gets too large for us to handle.  We spot the first of the advancing swarm.  Who is quickly joined by more. Time to turn up the heat a little.  Magnesium grenades work just like Molotovs, but they hit a lot harder, and the flames are larger, so they also burn for longer. One of the burrowers has caught fire and has panicked.  The fire field will also act as a buffer. Enemies will rarely walk across damage fields if they can avoid it. Unless they're already in the field, then they have no choice.  The ensuing chaos gives us a chance to retreat to relative safety.  Where we can recuperate from our poison and adrenaline withdrawal.  Once we're recovered, we rekindle the fire.  We're slowly winning, as long we don't let them surround us and our explosive supplies stay high.  We can always rest between grenade throws too.  They're starting to lie in ambush for us now.  So we make a few more grenades.  We fight our way to the doorway and use it and the stunned burrower as a bottleneck to keep from being overwhelmed with spawn.  Eventually things stops coming for us, so we advance eastward down the corridor.  We find another Old data medium in the nearby room.  And a 9mm Huszar, this was my assault rifle of choice for my assault rifle build, can't remember why.  There's lots of eggs about, but not any burrowers around it seems.  Seems like there's only the odd straggler left at this point.  We make our way back to where we last gave up and everything's quiet this time round. It looks like we've killed all the burrowers.  There's a lot of non-burrower blood pooled near this doors entrance.  And inside is a very wounded Jenny.  Administer the antidote and help her outside.I'm not sure what antidote we're talking about, we do have an antidote on our person, but it isn't used in this interaction at all. But whatever. We can finally bring her to Cliff outside.  "No thanks to you, you hopper." "What!? Yer makin' it sound like it was my fault? Ya were the one who wanted to press forward even though there were burrowers in there!" "Back then I didn't know you'd put your tail between your legs and run at the first sign of trouble! You know what you are, Cliff? You're one big...!" Leave them to their bickering.And that's that taken care of.  Okay that's basically everything we're going to be able to do at this point.  We finally make ourselves a very nice siphoner leather overcoat, it's got the same mechanical protection we've had anyway, but it's got a very decent protection from fire and acid. The acid protection is what we really want this for.  Enough stalling! We climb back down the worm hole and make our way into Depot A.  We're well and truly at a comfortable level to be in here.  This is going to be a blood bath... See you all next time. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 04:59
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Burrowers are assholes. If you're using a shotgun you can use the small-pellet shot to hit multiple Spawn at once.
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Jan 11, 2023 09:30
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Zeniel posted:
I don't think it is true - I've just tried it, and despite wearing gas mask I still got full damage from poison 
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Jan 11, 2023 20:18
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Szarrukin posted:I don't think it is true - I've just tried it, and despite wearing gas mask I still got full damage from poison drat it, I meant to write can't, not can. Yeah no, gas masks CAN"T resist poison damage. That's why its obvious. What actually can help is to eat a cooked burrower egg, which you can buy from all regular food outlets, or a drug called irongut. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 21:27
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Do enemies get blown up by their own mines if lured \ wandering into them?
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Jan 11, 2023 23:32
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Xander77 posted:Do enemies get blown up by their own mines if lured \ wandering into them? Funny you should ask... An upcoming situation will answer this in the next update.
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Jan 11, 2023 23:42
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Chapter 13 - Depot A massacre Welcome to Depot A everybody. The final testing ground for your character. Survive this place, and you're probably capable enough to take on the rest of the game. This time, we're gonna break this place over our knee.  Coming in through the wormhole, puts us into an underground bunker location. There's not major reason why you should pick this entrance over the Scrappers main entrance really, this is just how I normally choose to do it. There are cameras on this map, but they aren't hostile towards us.  We sneak into the nearest south door, mind the land mines in here. This map has many of them.  Through the next door we come across some new opponents for us, Junkyard Muties. Don't be concerned about their names or anything, they're essentially the same as normal human enemies. They'll be armed with either a pistol, smg, or assault rifle, or else a knife or sledgehammer. They don't have any protection what so ever, and none of them are psionic. They do tend to have packs of dogs with them though.  It's a bit noisy, but I throw a MkIII grenade into the room, which kills all but one.  A well thrown knife puts him down.  There was one last mutant, hiding in our blind spot, we adrenaline shot and taser them.  The ruckus from the grenade will likely have attracted attention to us, so we scramble into the vent in this room, which is mercifully already open.  From here we can peer back into the room to make sure the coast is clear.  Back in stealth, we climb out just in time to intercept one of the mutants that has come to investigate.  He's by himself, so he's no trouble for us.  Searching the bodies, we find the blueprint for EMP grenades, we'll be needing lots of those at various times.  One of the mutants has a low frequency modulator. At this point we've found more than enough parts to make a shield, but unfortunately, the blueprints are no where to be found, so we'll just have to wait till after depot A is done.  We find the junkyard mutie oddity, an Acid-Burnt Femur.  This room is oddities galore, another scrapture and an old train schedule.  We move on to clear other rooms, starting with the next one to the south.  Nothing in hear but some supplies not worth mentioning.  We climb up into the vents, as there's an easy oddity I know of up there.  We just follow the vents south to a screen transition.  And from there, there's an opening in some rubble.  We come out into a small cavern with our last Trilobite Fossil in it. This place is otherwise just used in the last black eel mission. It's empty otherwi...  ...uh...  Oh no... So there's a crawler in here. I don't think this crawler is always in here. This is bad. Although we did just dodge it's sting attack luckily.  So. Cave Crawlers. They are creatures that are perpetually in stealth and are extremely, extremely difficult to spot. They sneak up to you and try to sting you. They then cling to the ceiling and disappear. What this means mechanically is that they enter stealth again and teleport some distance away from you. If they succeeded in stinging you, you are now poisoned with crawler poison. After a few turns, the poison wears off, and you become stunned. The crawler then returns to you and starts to eat you. When the stun wears off, assuming you aren't dead, the crawler stings you again and goes back into hiding. Rinse and repeat. A single crawler is an obnoxious fight. But more often than not, you've walked into a whole nest of them. gently caress crawlers. The only effective way to kill a crawler, is to get the drop on one or be far away enough from one that it doesn't reach you when it starts combat. Then you have to find the drat thing before your turn is up. The best way to do this is to throw flares around and hope its silhouette appears. Another good way to find it is to surround yourself in bear traps and wait. Although you might not have any time to set them. (The feat fast tinkering can help you with that.) Alternatively, blindly throw grenades and pray you hit something. Or just hope you bump into it when stumbling around in combat can work too, not a bad strategy if you lure it into a bottleneck. There is also a feat that high intimidation characters can get called Yell which you can use to lower enemies combat skills, but it can also force enemies to leave stealth too. Assuming you manage to flush it out of stealth, they aren't too big of an issue as long as you keep it busy. If you're lucky it will just attack you normally and won't sting you or try to flee. I don't quite know how to trigger it to do that, but it does happen occasionally. They're chitinous insects, so they've got 20%/8 mechanical protection which is not the worst, but that means, about 28%/11 for us. We threw down to flares, but didn't spot anything. Great...  We decided to flee back to the way out, but got stung as we did.  The crawler then once again flees and we have two turns to get out of here before things get bad for us.  We easily get back to the vent and apply our antidote. A bit of a waste, since we weren't in any danger in here. But whatever, we'll find more antidotes.  From the vents we spot another room full of dogs and muties. We won't be approaching from this direction.  We climb back out into hallway again.  Up ahead is a lone guard dog. There is also a mine in pretty close proximity to this explosive barrel, the combined damage can almost certainly kill us.  Dogs aren't a big deal for us. Although they tend to cry out and summon more things if we let them.  Nearby there's a small room cut in half with some rubble. We could come back with explosives, but we can just climb in through the vents to get around it.  We find our first Painted Welding Helmet in here, they're also all over Depot A.  Getting to the other side of the rubble is pretty pointless to be honest, there's basically just a few empty lockers.  Next to this room is a pretty important security room.  Naturally, it's mined.  The computer terminal in the back of the room is one of the reasons we've been maximizing our hacking skill all this time. I think you want at least 50 to do something meaningful with it.  I'm not sure there's much you gain from level 1 access. Level 2 access will allow us to do some necessary things with a different computer later. Attempt to gain level 3 access.Hacking successful. Access upgraded to level 3 Enable/disable security auto-turrets. Having level 3 access though. Security Auto-Turrets - Turn OffWe can shut off all the gun turrets in the entirety of Depot A. Every single one of them. It's not strictly necessary. but this will save us a lot of headaches. Operation complete successfully. Exit Now that that's taken care of, we head southwards.  There's a pack of dogs hanging out in the back corridor.  We kill one and lob some throwing knives at the other.  It cries for help before going for our throats.  We manage to take out the dogs and enter stealth before the reinforcements come from that room we spied from the vents.  Whilst in the process of picking this door, the cavalry finally arrives.  We give them the ol' Henrietta hello.  More will likely be coming soon.  Two dogs in a bottle neck. We can take them out one at a time no problems.  We can see that dogs also get the pack hunting ability that rathounds get.  We sneak through the locked door, there's another mutie hanging out in the adjacent room.  He gets no chance to act.  We've already picked up three Acid-Burnt Femurs at this point. We've only just arrived and we're rapidly approaching another level.  We sneak down towards the room that we've likely lured all the enemies out of now.  Nothing but goodies left.  There's another chew toy oddity in here if you didn't find the one back in M'lan Ratula's outpost squat.  Also another scrapture in here.  There's also a keycard that lets you get level 2 access on that computer from earlier, so you don't need hacking to gain the necessary access to finish this place.  There is yet another Painted Welding Helmet oddity in here.  We also find our very first unique gun. The K&H MP6, all of the unique guns are based on real world equivalents. Like in this case we have a gun clearly based on the H&K blam master 3000. I dunno, I don't care about guns in real life. All of the unique guns in this game have slight stat changes from their normal equivalents. Most of them aren't really worth bothering with, you can easily make your own far superior guns pretty easily. Although I guess they might be worth using if you don't bother with the crafting system in this game. I dunno. One neat thing about them, that was added in recently, is that we can eventually meet a character, that if you give a certain item we haven't found yet, and present them with any unique gun, he will restore them to a better working condition for a nominal fee. It does make them better, but again, not as good anything you could make yourself.  We find ourselves a robe. It makes you blind, that's all it does.  We can see a ladder heading up in this room, this will lead to the map that the scrappers entrance is on. We will head here shortly.  North of here, there's a corridor with a now deactivated turret at the end of it. The double doors heading west are electronically locked and we will need to find a computer that unlocks them.  Inside is another ladder that leads to a different part of depot A. This room is also mined.  We make our way up the ladder.  And find ourselves in a corrugated shack.  More scraptures for our collection.  Just outside this shack is a new, and much despised enemy. There's a pretty large pack of mutated dogs roaming about this area. We find two of them.  The first thing to know about mutated dogs, is that whenever you hit them, they leaves puddles of acid everywhere.  The more you hit them, the bigger the acid puddles get.  If a mutated dog gets to move against you, it will open with an Acid Blob Attack. This does a bunch of acid damage against you and holds you in place.  This then leaves you at the mercy of all the dogs that come to rip you to pieces.  The acid blob will also continue to burn you. You can utilize this attack yourself if you use acid damage with a chemical blob pistol.  A nice grenade takes care of the growing horde of mutated dogs.  So this is why I strongly recommend any character to make themselves a nice piece of siphoner leather armor, possibly with some matching boots if you can spare it, before you come into Depot A. It will vastly improve your survivability in this place. Besides this, you could also find some mutated dog leather and make some armor or boots out of that too. There's isn't really any easy way to protect yourself against acid otherwise, unless you get lucky and find an enviro suit, although you will lose you mechanical protection if you wear that. But with siphoner leather alone, we're taking very little acid damage, from both the puddles and any attacks leveled at us too. I feel like a lot of people feel like their builds are too crap to get through junkyard, when in reality they just need some better equipment to deal with the hazards. Well that or they come here a little underleveled. A few levels can make all the difference in this place.  We stealth kill the remaining dogbomination.  We start to pick up their oddity too, their Acidic Tongue. Do not squeeze.  Most acidic enemies tend to drop acid glands too. You can use these to make acid flasks, that you can either throw at people or you can further turn them into ammunition for the chemical blob pistol. We probably won't bother with them.  We're getting extremely lucky with the oddity drops, it's making up the lackluster rathound oddity drops we got at the start of the game.  West of us is an electronic locked gate. It can be a little confusing, but you need to both find the necessary keycard AND electronically activate the gate in order to open it. We will find an alternative means to get around this particular gate though.  The rest of this area is fairly tame after we've dealt with the dogs.  We do find a sharpening stone that might be handy for a knife, sword, or spear character. It temporarily boosts you melee damage, at the cost of maximum durability. I've never used them, but I'm not sure how I feel about the permanent durability loss. That could be a big ask.  South of the dogs is a small barricade with some gun turrets in it. And mines apparently.  There's a number of dead bodies on the other side, cut down by the turrets no doubt.  We pick up some Fusion cells, these are basically better batteries. They give you more charge than the lithium cells. Handy once you start making higher capacity energy weapons and tools.  Yet another scrapture.  We also find the blueprints for a shotgun. It's a different colour from regular blueprints means that it was a blueprint added in by the Expedition DLC.  Swinging east of the barricade, we make our way into this nearby building.  I sweep for mines.  And more mines.  In a nearby crate we find the Haxxor Mk II, it gives a slight hacking bonus when we try to hack something and has a larger battery life, so we can hack more things more often.  There was also a blueprint for some contaminated bullets although weirdly only for 12.7mm rounds, that lets you add crazy amounts of bio damage to a target. I guess only sniper rifles can make use of them. Also this room has a secret door that lets you bypass the turret barricade if you have good enough perception.  We find an Empty Mutagen Container oddity, thank goodness it's empty.  This brings us up to level 10!  Our chemistry is now officially 69. We can finally relax on boosting chemistry which will open us up to focusing on our other important skills.  We take the Trigger Happy feat, which gives us more initiative. There are several fights I can think of where this will save us a lot of headaches.  We find the security terminal that needs us to have level 2 access to interact with. Security Inner depot auxiliary entrance.Control inner depot auxiliary entrance Inner depot auxiliary entrance - Change to: Unlocked.Operation completed successfully. Under passage transition door.Control underpassage transition door. Underpassage transition door - Change to: UnlockedOperation completed successfully. Now any electronically locked doors will not bar our way. Exit. We find some pretty good quality electronic items that will come in handy in future.  The very south of this map is a horrible mine field that will take us west.  This screen will take us straight to the main entrance of depot A. The one the scrappers control.  The gates to this place a typically locked, and you will either have to be good a picking or have found the key, or else use the trapdoors to get around them.  At this point we can finally make some Mk IV grenades. Very little will survive a hit from one of these in this place. We're down to our last piece of hexogen so we can only make one though.  We go up to this locker to investigate.  It had a mine in front of it.  Some muties come to investigate and stumble into the land mines over there. So yes, it looks like enemies can waltz into their own traps. Makes sense, you can walk into you own traps too. It's only fair.  The survivors get poisoned throwing knives to their throats.  Someone casts summon monster level I.  I counter cast with a fire ball.  Some friendly muties come to negotiate.  I slow the one with the knife, they tend to be good at crippling a good melee build if you let them.  I retreat to a better position and waltz into a mine.  I hide around the corner and wait for them to close the gap.  The slowed one lags behind the other.  He manages to cripple me.  Which just lowers your strength by 2. This kind of attack can also stack. Assuming a knife guy can hit you, they can render a strength melee build completely ineffective as they just drain you of all your strength and suddenly you can't hit anything. A good counter to this is to just wear heavy metal armor, knife attacks will typically just bounce off your armor with a satisfying ting sound.  This isn't too big of a deal for us.  Plus we just hurl throwing knives, which aren't strength dependent.  And we've already gotten our last Acid-Burnt Femur.  We also find out very first dog oddity, the Dog Collar. A Doggity if you will.  To the north is a very hard to pick gate that will take us further into Depot A.  To the west is the last muties in this area.  We pin one down with a net.  We poison the knife guy but don't manage to kill him.  The next round, he dies of the poison, and kill the netted mutie too.  He had a very nice shock sledgehammer on him. Extremely heavy, but it will sell for a lot.  We enter a flimsy shack that served as some sleeping quarters for the mutants.  Inside is an endoscopic eyepiece, which can be used to make something to peek under doors.  At this point we're running pretty low on lockpicks and there's plenty of things left to open. So we decide to head back out of Depot A to resupply. This is another tip worth mentioning if you're struggling with this place. You can always leave. Just walk out and resupply, go find some more experience if you need to and come back when you're ready. Some locations in this game will not be so generous. Next time, we will return to finish off Depot A.
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Jan 12, 2023 05:32
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Crippling can also be very nasty for a gun's user, a couple of stacks of it and suddenly you aren't strong enough to handle your weapons any more.
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Jan 12, 2023 09:28
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I like to burn the entire room with moltovs to flush out crawlers. It's the only way to be sure.
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Jan 12, 2023 09:36
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Zeniel posted:Funny you should ask...
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Jan 12, 2023 18:22
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Xander77 posted:I... must have missed it? There was a bit where a junkyard mutie came round to investigate a mine i walked into and he walked into another mine, that happened to be there.
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Jan 12, 2023 19:47
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Wow, I had no idea crawlers can spawn that early. Is there any recommended order to do things after Depot A? I am freshly done with it, both Faceless in Rail Crossing and burrowers in Camp Hathor are kicking my rear end and I have no clue whether I went there too early or just my build is crap (again).
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Jan 12, 2023 19:54
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Zeniel posted:There was a bit where a junkyard mutie came round to investigate a mine i walked into and he walked into another mine, that happened to be there.
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Jan 12, 2023 19:58
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Szarrukin posted:Wow, I had no idea crawlers can spawn that early. Your build is probably fine if you've made it that far. And your second spoilered location is normally where I'd go. But it doesn't have to be the first place, preparation is always key, so let's see if we can diagnose the problem. What's your current level,xp style, and difficulty? What's your current skill/feat loadout? And what does your current equipment loadout look like? Zeniel fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 20:56
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Xander77 posted:Ok. Could you walk around vents and set up noisy distractions at different points in the level to get the enemies to kill themselves \ clear out mines as they rush towards you? Or do they generally avoid mines unless somehow distracted? I believe the answer is, it depends, but generally yes. It depends because enemies are also able to spot traps, you can reduce their effectiveness at spotting by increasing your traps skill though. So if the trap was already planted before you arrived I suspect that they might have an easier time at spotting them. With a high enough trap skill you can recover traps whole, so you could always just replant them where they were. So they can step on their own traps, but they may not if they know where they are, unless it's a bottleneck. You can force the issue too by just plugging the gaps around a trap with more traps, then they will have no choice but walk into them anyway as they make their way towards you. As for making noisy distractions, most of the time it will work fine. As long as the enemies aren't deaf and/or are within earshot of the noise you make, which can vary from enemy type and depend on the difficulty you are playing on. But it's a very reliable tactic against humans at the very least. The other good way to lure enemies into traps, is to have a high enough stealth skill that when you're close enough to an enemy they get suspicious and start following you, but aren't quick enough to spot you immediately. They'll follow you over anything you like. Alternatively you can just place a trap in an enemies patrol path if they have one and wait. Now there is one caveat to traps that I haven't talked about, mostly because I always forget about it, and that's zone control. I'll do a quick rundown of what that is during some update, but basically, it just lets you know whether the presence of your traps will piss off friendlies or not. In short, don't plant traps while hanging out in town, unless you really, really, want to. And in neutral areas, don't let friendlies walk into your traps or they won't be so friendly. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 21:15
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Zeniel posted:Your build is probably fine if you've made it that far. And your second spoilered location is normally where I'd go. But it doesn't have to be the first place, preparation is always key, so let's see if we can diagnose the problem. 11lvl, Classic, Normal Throwing 40 (58) Stealth 45 (84) Hacking 60 (85) Lockpicking 60 (72) Mechanics 21 (29) Electronics 36 (51) Chemistry 33 (51) Biology 40 (60) Thought Control 65 (98) Metathermics 65 (111) Persuasion 55 (83) Feats: Pack Rathound, Sprint, Tranquility, Cerebral Trauma, Expanded Psi Capacitance, Premeditation, Meditation My usual rotation is stealth -> start fight with MK2/MK3 grenade -> Premeditation -> NO/Cryokinesis spam and Frighten for crowd control. I am literally defenseless against robots except EMP grenades. Also I'm a loving moron, because I was convinced that psi beetle armor has separate blueprint and only now realized that it falls under tactical vest/riot armor edit: just managed to clear Camp Hathor burrower location Szarrukin fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 22:17
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Szarrukin posted:Build stuff Yeah that seems like a perfectly fine set up so far. I'd say you need better equipment and definitely sink some points into tailoring, you need it to make some good psi gear! I don't know what you running with, but yeah get yourself some psi beetle gear ASAP, you'll want it to make it so your psi skills cost far less AP, especially if you're running with two different psi disciplines. It's okay if you're not ready to fight robots just yet, you can always sneak around most of them, and there is a way to deal with them in the Crossroads mission, just talk to some people in town. But it would be worth making a plan to deal with them more regularly in the future. Possibly work toward higher Mk EMPs is a good idea, and getting some plasma grenades is also worth doing too. I'd also recommend making a taser, it's always handy to have one on you, and it can disable robots too. You will eventually get a Metathermics skill that works well on robots and you're not far off being able to afford it too, don't know where it's located though haha. Sometimes it hard to be a psi-mage. But yeah, looks like you're making progress, keep at it. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Jan 13, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 00:30
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The Immortal Gunslinger Here we've arrived at the scrappers entrance, we have permission to be back here so no one will attack us. Nobody asks any questions on how we got back here in the first place, thankfully.  We run back to SGS and drop off/pick up some goodies.  I make a whole handful of MkIV frags.  I decide to drop by Ezra to grab neural overload.  "I hear you are a powerful mind controller. Is thistrue?"  Ezra remains silent and just stares at you. "If this is true I'd like learn from you." He just keeps staring at you. "Stare back at him." At first nothing happens, and the two of you just stand there staring at each other. Your thoughts slowly start to drift away from what you are doing and you almost don't even notice that you're losing control of your own body. The world around you blurs away until the only thing you can clearly see is Ezra's one eye staring at you. It seems as if it's not looking at your face, but through it - into your mind. (Will) Try to wrestle back the control of your body.Yeah, we do not have the will to fight back against Ezra. You try to fight the intrusion, but Ezra's will is too strong. You stand there for a few moments, held like a prisoner in your own body, and then the world disappears.Technically it's impossible to start with any will score capable of fighting back, but if your will is high, it will take him by surprise and that will give us time to break free before what next happens.   We wake up on the small island at the south end of mushroom cove.  We now know neural overload at least.  There's a young psi beetle on the island with us.  Once we kill it we pass out again.  And wake up in our bed.  Learning neural overload has put it in our brain slot, so our temporal abilities will cost 10% more to cast. So we'll just innervate that out for the time being.  We then need to huff some psi inhalant to restore all of our psi points and reserves.  I forget to talk to Ezra about what happened, but we'll be back here after Depot A is over. We pick a few energy blueprints, but nothing worth mentioning.  And we head back to Depot A through the worm hole again.  With the double doors in the far west electronically locked, we can proceed deeper into the lower levels of this place.  This place will be the toughest part of Depot A for my build.  Because its full of bloody robots.  Which I still can't reliably hit.  Even my shock gloves aren't very effective against them.  In the room south of here is a lone bot standing guard.  My best bet is to get a lucky hit with a mkII or mkIV frag grenade. We can follow through with an EMP grenade if that doesn't work, since frags and EMP grenades are on different cool down timers.  This, will be sufficient for the time being, we can also try to lump the robots all together to take them out as efficiently as possible.  This room has a keycard that I think opens the electronic gate we saw, or possibly another, similar gate.  The central area has a few lockers and goodies in it.  Like land mines.  At the far west end of the area, is a location where some robots will patrol closely near this explosive barrel.  Which really helps me dismantle them.  With our EMP's helping out too.  This room is a nightmare if you haven't disabled the turrets. There's two of them in the back, plus two stationary bots.  The cameras in this area are hostile too, but this one gets taken out in the explosion.  With the EMPs finishing the job.  We find another Registration Plate. The last one cannot come soon enough.  This last robot catches us off guard whilst our grenades are on cool down, so we have to stun it with a taser.  We're forced to take it apart with out bare hands.  A few very lucky crits manage to do the job.  Sigh, more landmines.  Another scrapture for us back here.  Also an old data medium too.  And even a painted welding helmet, this room is well worth attempting, turrets or no turrets.  We also find some energy pistol blueprints.  And the keycard to another gate. The keycards are important. A lot of the harder locations in this game often have you running all over the map to find some keys to open locations elsewhere, to find more keys to open more locations elsewhere. It's definitely a design theme I've noticed occur a lot in this game.  All the doors on the western wall of this area are electronically locked.  Each one leads to a small bedroom.  We keep searching the other room in the center of the map.  We find the frame that you need to make an energy pistol.  And the blueprints to make advanced health hypos. We will definitely want a lot of these at some point. The advanced health hypos that is, not the blueprints, we only need the one of those.  This rooms has a hallway that swings east.  At the back is small security office.  That is heavily trapped.  Another scrapture.  The only live camera remaining lets us see the last robot hiding in a room with another turret.  Yet more mines!  Protecting another painted welding helmet.  And another Psi mentor, for Psycho-temporal Dilation again, dangit.  This lone robot isn't an issue at all. In the back of this room is a door that leads to a ladder going up. We'll ignore it for now and head back to scrapper entrance instead.  This time by using the trapdoor to get there.  We will now head north.  We've got mad lockpicking skills thanks to our very high dexterity, so we can pick this no problems.  We arrive in the next area and we've stumbled upon another new enemy.  These are mutants, what I sometimes call true mutants, so we don't confuse them with the junkyard muties we've been fighting.  These guys, like the mutated dogs, will spill acid as you hit them.  They don't have any armor so they're not that difficult to hit, although they are completely immune to acid and biological damage (although you can still poison them). What they do have is a lot of health, 300 to be exact. They also have a natural 20 strength! Note that you cannot naturally obtain 20 strength in this game, at most, you could hit is 18, and 19 with some equipment, you could push it to 20 temporarily with some food items, drugs, or some rare equipment. Well, there is one way to make it naturally 20... But that's a secret... For now... Point being, these guys hit very hard, so don't let them do that.  The first one we kill drops our first and only Mutant Claw oddity.  There's more mutants lurking about this map.  He was hanging out near an explosive barrel though, so he doesn't live very long.  The ruckus will no doubt bring more mutants to us so we hide and stealth at the first opportunity.  Some mutated dogs come instead.  Their puny acids are of no concern to us.  They're not fond of my grenades either.  And we've already maxed out on Acidic Tongues too.  With the fighting dying down, we can explore this large shack.  Where we find our final Painted Welding Helmet.  We have the next electronically locked roller door, which we should be able to open already, and we do. Technically, if we go in there, we've already finished this place. But we'll explore the rest of the area and find an alternative way there instead.  We find another low frequency shield modulator.  To the east leads to the other side of the roller door we found last update. We couldn't open it from back there, and you can only open it from that side so we can't actually use this transition to go back here. Not that we need to.  We find another Empty Mutagen Container.  And a blueprint of an item that will let Henrietta stream her own letsplays. Actually its a drug that improves our initiative. Unfortunately half of the ingredients we need for it are only found in the far off DLC part of the game. So unless somebody sells the ingredients otherwise, we will have to wait to make some of this.Assuming we had the biology and chemistry skill to do so.  To the north is large storage building that leads to the next area.  It holds another scrapture.  And we head out west of here.  This is last area of Depot A, we're nearly done.  We find a blueprint that lets us make Frag Mine cases, not very useful for us. Their one of the many, many items you can make out of metal plates.  Exploring this small storeroom leads to explosions.  Which draws all the mutants in the area to us, bring it on!.  I test out my MkIV grenades, and they work pretty drat well on them.  The mutant does survive however, so I throw a poisoned dagger at him.  He responds with a Yell attack. Mutants also get that ability themselves. Which will lower our combat skills, I'm uncertain if they would ever be able to use it to pull us out of stealth prematurely.  The mutant pulls out a new trick and vomits acid on us. Which both hits you and covers the floor in puddles.  He runs up, strikes us, and then succumbs to his poison.  We grab the scrapture in this small room before the acid eats through our armor. Acid puddles will fade away over time, but it is annoying waiting for them to disappear.  Before I can leave however, some mutated dogs come to say hello.  We're taking a lot of acid damage, more than our armor can reasonably handle. So we need to end this quickly.  Fortunately we're pretty good at punching dogs at this stage, mutant or otherwise.  We also find a lifting belt in here too. This is a must have for sledgehammer builds, as it will improve you AP cost for swinging one, as well as offset the carry weight of the hammer too.  These dogs drops some pretty good quality mutated dog leather. I hang onto it for potential future gear.  That was all the enemies to fight in Depot A, so now we just have to scavenge the rest of the place.  Our very last scrapture.  And our second last Empty Mutagen Container.  There's a shack in the back that leads down to the place where all the robots were. I believe there's some rubble on the north wall of here that mentions that the place is blocked off. I'm not sure what that is referring to exactly, I don't think there's any way back there, not that I've ever seen anyway.  Finding the key to these doors is what you need to finish this place for good.  Fortunately we already had, so we take a look inside this inconspicuous barrel behind them.  We find a Strange Wrist Computer oddity. Hmm strange indeed. Taking it, brings us up another level.  And next to it is the Armadillo Class Drill Rotor Circuit Board, that we've been searching for! Touching this is where I officially declare that we have successfully survived the early game. We are now highly confident that we can handle any challenge this game will throw at us.  To celebrate, let's level up.  The main feature of this level up is we now have a high enough Temporal Manipulation skill to learn our next psi ability.  We also finally start to putting points into our Mercantile skill at last, it may still be awhile before it comes in handy.  Now all we have to do is navigate this mine field and we're home free.  Although we should check out this one last area.  Once we clear the remaining mines out first.  Inside this shack is, a human...?  Wyatt's not kidding, he has a unique high caliber revolver on him, the only revolver in the game in fact. "Take it easy, man. I mean you no harm." "And just what the heck are you doing here?" "I was just scavenging. I didn't expect to find any non-mutants here." "Go scavenge outside. Everything in this house belongs to yours truly, and I aim to keep it that way." "That's alright with me."You can try to intimidate him, not that I've ever tried, but I strongly suspect this man doesn't scare easily. He relaxes a little bit. "Good." "Who are you?" "I'm Wyatt Pear. I used to run this depot back in the day, before it went to hell. Stayed here even when everyone else fled or went insane from mutations."Wyatt Pear you say... "Why do you still live here among this junk and mutants?" "This is my home. This is where I lived and worked all my life, and this is where I'll die someday probably." "What? You think living with mutants is dangerous? Living anywhere is dangerous, but at least I know where the danger lies in this place and how to avoid it." "What happened to this place? How did all these mutants come to be?" "You know, over the years I had these jackass Scrappers come to me occasionally, asking me all sort of questions before trying to kill me and consequently becoming dog food." "But no one asked that, even though it's the only question that matters." "You see one day these two strange men came to trade. I think they were Biocorp scientists, but I can't be sure." "One was bald and pale and wearing a breathing mask. He had wires coming out of his skull and one of his eyes. And the other one was very skinny and his face seemed to have been burned. He was eyeing me so intensely I kept my hand on my gun the whole time."One of those guys sounds very familiar... Very familiar indeed... "But that didn't matter. We traded with everyone, including Biocorp weirdos. So I sold them some petrol, mindshrooms and some other stuff, and they traded me... a pack of fusion cells." "I remember checking every cell to be real and full. Sometimes, people will be stupid enough to try to scam me. The cells were all good, though." "After that they left." "I woke up the next day to the sound of my dogs squealing. I rushed out to my living room only to see them convulsing on the floor and retching blood and acid. His face grimaces in pain and disgust as he speaks. "I could do nothing to help them so I put bullets in their skulls to end their misery. And I charged out. I was furious! Someone poisoned my dogs and I was going to get to the bottom of it." "But as I ran through the depot I realized something much worse had happened: Everyone I ran into was either dissolving in a pool of acid they had retched or were overgrown with these green boils, stumbling around - or had turned completely demented; for most of them it was all of the above." "I was dashing around like in a dream... or a nightmare rather. I didn't know what to do. I just stumbled from one building to the other and finally ended up in my shop." He sighs deeply. "Behind the counter there were those energy cells that I acquired the day before. It's hard to describe what was going in my mind at that moment... They were definitely the things I purchased from those two scientists, and examined and accepted to be fusion cells..." "...only they were nothing of the sort. Not at that moment, not when I purchased them. Do you understand?! They messed with my mind, made me think one thing was another!" Wyatt grimaces and puts his hands over his face.One of them was able to manipulate your mind you say...? After he composes himself, he continues. "They were mutagen containers." "So how come the mutagen affected everyone except you?" "It did affect me as well, but not quite in the same way." "Here in this forsaken place it's sometimes easy to forget... but look around you, girl. Look at these ruins!" "The event that I recounted to you happened more than a hundred years ago!" "And yet here I am still alive and kicking. I didn't age a bit. I never got sick since." "I never even slept."So this is an interesting revelation. I wonder if there are other immortals running around the place... "Perhaps I was the result they were hoping for and some day they will come to reap what they've sown." "I really hope that's the case." He twirls his gun on his finger. "I'll wait for them a thousand years if I must. And I will kill them. Be they men or something else." Wyatt doesn't really have anything worth stealing. At least he's got some new dogs to keep him company back here.  We triumphantly march our way back out of Depot A.  Through Depot B and the rest of Junk Yard.  Home Sweet Home.  We make a quick stop by Ezra as we have a few questions for him.  "Do you know a man called Wyatt Pear?" His eye stares at you, but reveals nothing. "No." "Interesting. Cause he told me he was visited by two men many years ago in Old Junkyard - one of which looked very much like yourself, Ezra, based on his description. It was around the time of that mutagen disaster." "You are speaking to the wrong man, Henrietta. I suggest you seek that doppelganger of mine and continue this conversation with him, because I can't help you."Ezra is almost certainly lying to us. That also means that Ezra himself is well over a century old too. We won't be able to inquire with him about this further, but we'll eventually uncover more about who Ezra actually is later. But I think it's safe to restate that Ezra is, dangerous. "Was that all you wanted to ask me?" "What did you do to me?"This question is referring to when we had the mind duel with him earlier. "Only what you wanted. Consider that first lesson free of charge."He can now sell us a few other thought control abilities. But they're not for us. "See you later."Now we can head back to Ethan to pick up the last Temporal Manipulation skill he can teach us.  "I'd like to learn some abilities." "Certainly." He smiles. "I can teach you temporal distortion, limited temporal increment and psycho-temporal dilation." "Tell me about limited temporal increment." "Limited temporal increment is a simple but tricky-to-learn ability that allows a manipulator to shift, or increment the natural temporal state of personal objects, psi abilities and such to their first next stable state, provided that they are not in it already. The theory behind it is highly complicated, but what happens in practice is that the manipulator will be one natural temporal increment closer to using those objects or abilities again."What this well crafted technobabble is saying is that we will have an ability that will let us decrease our cool down times. So this will let us throw grenades more often and also use drugs or other abilities faster. This is a fantastic and endlessly practical ability. "It's an indispensable part of every manipulator's arsenal."That it is. "I usually charge more, but for you I'll make it... eighty stygian coins to teach you this ability. But since we're in SGS... I'll accept two hundred credits as well. Whichever you have."We pretty much out of SGS credits for the moment, so stygian coins it is. "Here you go." Give him 80 stygian coins. "Excellent, excellent." He pockets the money. "Time for us to go..." "We could use my room." "Perfect." "Ladies first." Lead the way. Limited Temporal Increment is as good as it will ever get. Having more Temporal Manipulation skill will not make it better in any way, but that's okay. It's fine just as it is.  So at long last we head back to Tanner to give him the good news.  "I found that Armadillo drill whatsitcalled." Give him the circuit board.Circuit board, Henrietta, you're not an idiot you know a circuit board is.  "That's excellent news. I'll get this to Harold so he can start repairing the drill immediately. This will aid us in clearing the tunnels significantly."Tanner is not the most emotionally expressive individual, but that's okay we like the big guy all the same. "I don't have anything more for you to do right now, Henrietta. Go and take some rest. You've more than deserved it."Finally some well deserved R&R. Retire for the day. But life in the Underrail... is about to change...     "Got hit by a couple of aftershocks, but they weren't anything serious." He nods. "We felt them here too, but I think it's over now."Rumble Rumble Rumble Rumble "..."Rumble..Rumble..Rumble..Rumble "Maybe I spoke too soon." "Wait... this is not an aftershock..."        I think this is going to be a looong day.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:41
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I don't think you need to show off the same oddity over and over, particularly if we find several in the same update. "It was a hundred years ago, but everyone involved are still around" is a particularly stupid trope to have in a post-apocalyptic setting.
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Jan 13, 2023 14:45
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Xander77 posted:
Just to clear. This has nothing to do with the apocalypse. The event that caused everyone to move underground happened several generations ago is not explicitly known about by anyone nor is it ever really explained in this game. The fact that there are a few people still around a century later than they realistically should be, is nothing to do with that. All of those characters are far younger than whatever catastrophe befell the earth. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jan 13, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 21:26
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Xander77 posted:"It was a hundred years ago, but everyone involved are still around" is a particularly stupid trope to have in a post-apocalyptic setting. I believe "everyone" are two people explicitly stated to be immortal (one because of mutation, one for reasons unknown) and like Zeniel pointed out, they are completely unrelated to apocalypse. I think that Underrail does hundreds years old post-apocalyptic setting pretty good ie. basically nothing about pre-apocalypse world is known, duh, we don't even know what actually made humanity to go underground. There are no 2137 references to pre-war world like in Fallout/Atom/Metro 2033. Even things that happened mere decades ago (Biocorp, Omega Station vs. SGS war) are almost forgotten.
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Jan 13, 2023 23:44
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Do they even say if the game specifically takes place on Earth?
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Jan 14, 2023 00:17
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King Doom posted:Do they even say if the game specifically takes place on Earth? I don't think so. There's nothing explicitly that suggests that it does that I can think of, other than it being not unreasonable to assume.
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Jan 14, 2023 01:19
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Chapter 15 - SGS Needs Batteries We awake in our room to the sounds of 'You've got mail!'  We take the time to admire the art on our walls. This one is called, The Broken Pixel. The tiny writing says: This colorful mosaic doesn't seem to represent anything in particular.  Our other objet d'art, is the hanged rat, it reads: What could it mean... We head over to our laptop to see what the blinking mail sign is all about.  Personal MessagesNew personal messages: 6 Read message: 'Faceless' from Public Feed (NEW!)Title: Faceless Author: Public Feed To all stations, The Faceless have been spotted in multiple locations throughout South Underrail. They are using large tunneling machines to transport troops, and all reports suggest that they are heavily armed and large in numbers. They have already shown hostility toward Core City and Rail Crossing. All stations are urged to mount their defenses and report any Faceless sightings as soon as possible. We saw them attacking Core City earlier, but it seems like they've also gone after a place called Rail Crossing too. 'Semi-urgent' from Harold (NEW!)Title: Semi-urgent Author: Harold Greetings, Please come down here and see me when you have the time. There's something I need help with. 'Camp Hathor' from Big Bret. (NEW!)Title: Camp Hathor Author: Big Bret I've got something to discuss with you about Camp Hathor, so please come and see me when you have the time. If you haven't heard of it, I'll explain everything when you get here. 'Urgent' from Tanner (NEW!)Title: Urgent Author: Tanner Come see me in my office as soon as you wake up. ExitOur boss wants us to head to his office ASAP, we'll head over there immediately.  Nah, gently caress that, she'll be right. We instead decide to break into a few of our neighbors sleeping quarters. Timing our hacks against the motion of the camera.  Inside we discover that some of the residents of SGS have got a double bed, twice the space and a dining area, such luxury.  The only thing worth noting about breaking into the other rooms is that they tend to have large stacks of SGS credits to steal.  This place has two big stacks in fact.  In the nearby locker we find a groin guard. This is a belt slot item that makes you immune to stun from the dirt kick ability. If you're male it also reduces critical hit chances against you too. This is far too situational to ever be worth using even if we were male in my opinion.  With our decent tech stats, we start to refine up some items. We process our mindshrooms into Unsaturated Psionic Catalysts.  We can then combine them with oxygen tanks and cotton buds to make psi inhalants. Note how you only need 15 Biology and 10 Chemistry to make these. So it's well worth starting out with at least those stats if you're going for a psi mage build. It'll save you expensive trips back to Pasquale early on.  We also make some Psi boosters too.  We can also hack this interesting looking door next to the elevator.  Oh. It's the security room.  Right away sir.  We head back down to Pasquale to ask him about current events.  https://lpix.org/4434986/Henriette.png "What are your thoughts on the Faceless invasion?"  "I must say it's an exciting turn of events. We know so little about the Faceless and how their society works. Rumor has it that they have highly developed psionic abilities and that they communicate through telepathy."Pretty much every character going forward will have something to say about the Faceless. They're so secretive that the most reflective people we'll meet will tell you that no one really knows anything about them.  We pick up some more ampules and syringes to maintain our drug lab.  Down on the engineering and cyber floor, we have another door in a security blind spot we can hack.  But it's just the stations server room. There's nothing in there for us. We stop by Ezra.  "I have some new equipment, if you are interested." "What are your thoughts on the Faceless invasion?" "It is hard to determine motivations of their kind. People will be getting hysterical in fear, thinking that the Faceless have come to conquer or destroy our civilization." "While in truth, the nature of this conflict is probably much less serious. The Core poked their sticky fingers a bit too deep underground and is about to lose an arm for it." "Do you have anything to trade?" Ezra is now stocking an Energy Shield Emitter blueprint, which we promptly buy. We make our way to Harold to see what his email was about.  "Of course Harold, what's this all about?" "I wanted to talk to you about something that is luckily not as urgent at this moment, but important none the less. You see, after the earthquake we experienced a major power outage; whole station went black. Usually when things like that happen, our backup generators switch on to provide power until we get our main power back." "Keep talking, I'm interested." "Will do. The thing is, there is a delay before the backup generators kick in. It's usually just several seconds, but that means we have an interruption in power, and for many reasons that is unacceptable. Just imagine you're in the med bay, being operated on, and suddenly there's no power anymore. That's just one example; I won't go into mentioning all the systems in SGS that require constant power supply." "Now, this time, during the earthquake, we've had such a large number of batteries die all at once it's insane. Yes, most of them were pretty old optoelectric nuclear batteries; don't mistake them for common nickel-palladium fusion batteries, though. These are very rare." "Interesting, but what do you need me for?" "Currently, we have a few optoelectric batteries to spare, but if they keep dying, we're gonna be in big trouble. So, I want you to go to an old battery recycling plant not too far away from here; it's to the east, past the Crossroad Caves. It's been out of commission for years, but maybe you can find something there that we can use. Spare optoelectric cells, related equipment or blueprints... you find any of that, make sure you bring it to me."This will be the first place we will go to next, it's pretty close by and is more of a puzzle challenge than anything else. "There's no other place we know of that might have anything similar." "Why can't you use different batteries?" "Well, the thing is simple. SGS was originally built by the Biocorp's military, long before anyone of us even came here, so obviously they had some advanced tech at their disposal. Optoelectric nuclear batteries were already in use, and even though theoretically you could use fusion batteries, or any other type, we've had no luck with that. It's like the system refuses to work with anything else." (Electronics) "I see. By the way, how do these optoelectric batteries work? I'm really interested." "It's complicated... You sure you can understand it?" "Fusion battery facilitates extremely small scale nuclear fusion in order to produce a single high energy discharge." "I see you've read the label, but I'm sorry, optoelectric batteries seem really advanced for you. Now, will you go to the recycling plant for us?"It's at this point, that we note that our electronics skill could really do with a large boost. Being able to make good energy gear will be critical for our future survival. I forget how much electronics you need to impress Harold with our in depth knowledge of optoelectric batteries. But its entirely flavor text if we do so no big deal. "Deal, I'm on the job." "Excellent. Now keep in mind that the earthquake sealed off certain parts of the caves, so you'll probably need explosives. Other than that, be careful when you enter the plant itself; it's been out of commission for quite a while, so who knows what you'll find there. If you can bring me something good, I'll pay you three hundred credits."We will definitely need to grab some of those. "Good luck, Henrietta. See you later." "Before I leave..." "Yes?" "What have you got to barter?" We replenish our lockpick supplies and grab another box.  We then head to the armory to grab some heavy explosives.  "What do you think 'Of the Faceless invasion?" "I heard a lot about the Faceless, or Tunnelers, as some call them, and none of it was any good. They are vile creatures from the depths, most likely Deep Caverns, who steal Underrailers and feast on their flesh. Kind of like Lurkers, but less human. One cousin of mine told me they stole his son, and he saw them do it." "If Core City falls, we all fall, unless the Protectorate somehow make a last stand at Fort Apogee. But they are cut off from the North. However, I'm optimistic. Humans are resilient creatures, and we ain't gonna give up easily." "I'd like to see your stock." We grab the TNT charge blueprints to make our own explosives when we can.  We then buy more volatile substances and any TNT charges he has on him. The only serious drawback to TNT charges is that they're somewhat heavy. You tend to want to keep a few of these on you at all times, because you never know when you might need one, but they will weigh you down.  Heading back to the sleeping quarters, there's another door we can hack in the adjacent hallway. It's actually outside of the camera at the end of halls sight range, so we can hack this at our own leisure.  Some more filthy fiat currency for our coffers. There are a few more doors on this floor that can be hacked, but the camera at the end of the hallway has such a small sweep arc that it's impossible to unlock them without being caught. It might be possible if we had the Burglar feat, that reduces hack and pick times by 75%, maybe. There is another way to deal with cameras which I will show off if we ever get the chance to that might work too.  We head down to the commons, Vencil the guy from the tutorial, is still chilling out down here. We go say hi to the newly recovered Newton.  "How are you feeling, man?" "Better. The leg's still hurting from time to time, but I'll soon be as good as new-ton." He laughs. "As you can see, I'm kinda relaxing here with the rest." "You do that. Take care of yourself." "Thanks. I will. Cheers!"Long life to you Newton.  Jonas is hanging out at the bar, he may have a story about the deep caverns that he promised to finish for us.   "I got more questions about the tunnels for you." "Shoot." "You promised to tell me about your descent into the Deep Caverns." "Well, it's somewhat of a long story. You sure you wanna hear it?" "Heck yes." "It happened a long time ago, and my memory's a bit... fuzzy, but here goes: I was young, strong and handsome - a strappin' young lad, hehe. I was a scavenger at heart, still am, a spelunker that explored nearly all caves in South Underrail. One day I got the opportunity to go deeper - into Deep Caverns." "There used to be a workin' elevator that would take you down there. It's still there next to the Hangin' Rat, down in the caves, but it ain't workin' anymore."The Hanging Rat is a bar hidden in the upper caverns. We were pretty close to it the last time we went there. "Anyway, I took a ride down and soon enough I arrived to an old ruined Biocorp compound that was built inside a series of large caverns." "For days I explored it, avoidin' burrowers, slimes, and other mutated monsters too horrible to describe. Grabbing all the valuable doohickeys that I could fit in my backpack." "Should've seen me back in those days. I was at the top of my game."A master of rifling through dumpsters and old barrels, is Old Jonas. "One day I went very far into the facility, farther than I've ever been before. And, as I mentioned, I got to the mutagen tanks. The real ones." "And they are not just a myth as some say, they are very real. Bunch of big silos connected all about the place with large pipes. They were empty though. You could even walk inside some of them on account of them being broken open." "I was lookin' around the place when I noticed this hatch with a big ol' biohazard sign on it. Now, I've seen these before down there so I didn' think much about it before I opened it and got down the ladder." "They usually led down to small rooms with nothin' special in them. This time, however, it led me to somethin' that scared the living bejesus out of me." "What was it?!" "I..." "I have no idea."I do... "...What?" "I don't remember what I saw there." "The next thing I knew I was runnin' back to the elevator. I never went back down there again." "That's one crazy story, old geezer."This is some real late game foreshadowing. "But it's all true." We grab some more lockpicks off of Jonas. "See you later, old geezer."We strike up a conversation with Arlene. "Back for a drink?" "What are your thoughts on the Faceless invasion?" "I am very worried about the whole situation. It's not that we don't get station wars often, but they never involved the Faceless so far." "My late husband was a scavenger and he encountered the Faceless occasionally. They are not like us, you know. You can't negotiate or reason with them like you can with a human enemy. You don't know what motivates them."We will find out somewhat though, eventually. "Gotta run." We finally report for duty, and and Gorsky is also in Tanners office.  He nods in agreement to what Gorsky said, before turning to you. "We'll need your assistance with this as well." "Some sort of an attack has been carried out against Core City up north a few hours ago. The reports are sketchy, but apparently the Faceless are involved somehow." "My contact tells me that the Faceless used their tunneling machines to circumvent the city's outermost defenses and deployed their forces just outside the city, cutting off the tunnel to the north. They haven't attempted to invade the city itself though. Not yet, anyway." "It is clear why they attacked in this particular spot. If any help was to arrive from the Protectorate up north, it would have to pass through the north tunnel. But since the tunnel is now controlled by the Faceless, it would be the easiest thing in the world for them to simply collapse it, delaying the Protectorate deployment indefinitely." "They obviously wouldn't need that tunnel themselves. They make their own." "All this is very strange. Faceless don't usually attack unless provoked. We know that they don't like the Protectorate much and are known to skirmish with them on occasion, but as far as I can remember they've never waged war on any independent station." "But that's not all I'm afraid." "In addition to the reports from Core City, we've also received a distress signal from Rail Crossing. They are having troubles of their own. We don't have any details regarding this, but apparently Faceless are involved there as well." "Who are the Faceless exactly?" "Thing is - no one really knows. They live somewhere, or maybe everywhere, in the tunnels far below. Lower than most humans could endure living. They wear masks, never showing their faces, hence the name." "Many stories about them and their origins circulate the Underrail, but it's impossible to tell which ones are true. Ask around if you're curious." "Can you tell me anything about Core City?" "It's a city that lies on the border between the north Underrail, controlled mostly by the Protectorate and the United Stations, and the south Underrail which is where we are." Gorsky smirks. "The land of the free." "The Core City spans both Lower and Upper Underrail, but since the upper railroad connections have all collapsed, the city's Lower Underrail north tunnel is the only connection to the Protectorate territory." "What sort of place is Rail Crossing?" "It's an independent station built inside an old train depot to the northwest. Relatively peaceful place. We do a good amount of trading with them." "What do you want me to do?" "I want you to find out what's going on in Rail Crossing, assist them if you can and report back to me." "Avoid engaging the Faceless if possible. We don't want to draw any unwanted attention. If you can find out what is causing them to attack these places, that would be helpful." "I'm heading out to Core City myself to check out the situation there. You should meet me there as soon as possible. Look for me in the Hardcore City Bar."Gorsky will spend the rest of the game in Core City so we'll head there the next time we need an angry man to yell at us. "Vera has a job for you as well. Be sure to speak with her before you set out." "Alright I'm off." "Good luck." "You're going to need it."So our next main task is to find out why the Faceless are attacking the places they've attacked and stop any further attacks. Simple.  We head down to Vera Hales office on the Admin floor.  "No." "The Faceless blockaded the city. They drilled right into the city perimeter defenses with their machines and caught them by surprise. Now we're cut off from the North and cannot receive any assistance from the Protectorate." "Is there something I can do to help with the Facelesssituation?" "Yes, two of our own, Terry and Lora Baker, were on a merchant mission to the north when the Faceless invaded.We know they didn't get caught behind the blockade because they messaged in from the Core City before the assault happened." "They were supposed to head straight back to SGS, but then this earthquake happened and blocked the railway, preventing their return. They might have stopped by Rail Crossing, in which case they might have been caught by whatever trouble is happening there." "Gorsky tells me you know how to handle trouble. Investigate these two places, find the Bakers and return them home safely." "I hope it won't come to this, but if... they didn't make it, make sure you return their valuables and trade goods then." "Alright, got it."This is by far, the longest quest in this game, we won't be finishing this any time soon. "Who are the Faceless exactly?" "We don't know. They live somewhere in the tunnels below. They are human, I hope, but I'm not sure since I've never seen one without a mask." "I delivered the trading documents." "Excellent. It's good to know I can count on you to get the job done." "See you later." I do a quick poke about the unexplored areas of this floor. I discover the facilities.  The only other door we can break into on this floor simply by hacking is this one.  It's just another server room.  Down on Agronomy, there's a fairly easy door we can break into.  It contains a small armory. We've got some EMP mines, that we won't be able to use.  There's also some gun lockers with explosives and some guns in them too.  We go say hi to Quinton.  "What are your thoughts on the Faceless invasion?" "I dissected all kinds of monsters in my lab and learned their secrets, but I nust admit the Faceless are still a mystery to me." "What I wouldn't give for a fresh corpse of a Faceless... but then again, I heard bad things happen to those who try and linger near their dead. People say their brethren come for their corpses; they leave no man behind, apparently, dead or alive. So, maybe it's for the best they are not readily available." He laughs.You're a weirdo Quinton. "Are they just religious like that, or is there something behind their masks that they hide? I wonder." "Let's trade." We grab more magnesium to stop our muscles cramping and go see what Big Bret wants from us.  Yes "Good! Some people around here never check their drat mail. Irresponsible, if you ask me. Now, you've heard of Camp Hathor, right?" "No, I haven't." "Okay. Camp Hathor is a hunting camp situated not too far to the east, past the old battery recycling plant if you're going on foot, or south through the Meatway then north up Isaac's River if taking the waterways. It used to be a mining camp, but after the coal mine was closed, some miners stayed there and began hunting and exporting animal meat. They supply us with a good chunk of the meat we consume here."What the heck is a Meatway? We'll make our way over there after we're done with Harold's task. "The thing is, we've lost contact with them after the earthquake. I'd like you to go there and see what's going on. See if everything's okay." "Sure, I'll check it out." "Excellent. You know where to find me."We restart the conversation to ask him about the Faceless. "You got those drill parts by digging through Junkyard, I hear. You really are the errand girl of this station." "What are your thoughts on the Faceless invasion?" "I don't know much about the Faceless. Hell, no one does. I wonder if all these years they've kept to themselves in the low tunnels they were actually just amassing for an invasion." "That's about it. They never presented themselves as a threat, they lived in the places no sane human would want to live, leaving all the good habitat to us. They made sure we know next to nothing about them, their technology, culture, motivations, numbers." "Maybe now they're finally feeling strong enough to take us all on." "If that's the case do you think they might succeed?" "I don't know, but what I do know is we aren't going down without a fight." "Must be going." We pick up the last two dog crates in storage. I thought we'd only need the one, but there is another use for these.  We make our way to Malcom, once again, not commenting on the incorrect spelling of his name.  "Open the gate, please. I'm off to the caves." And we're off on our magical adventure. The game world has now gotten much, much larger. Danger not withstanding, I would say we can access about 90% of the games content at this point, but that isn't strictly true. It's more like 65% for reasons I won't explain.  Crossroads cave is now very lonely without Old Jonas hanging about.  Just east of there, we can finally clear up some of this rubble.  We plant the charge.  Start a reasonable distance and wait 10 seconds.  A loud kaboom and the rocks take an absurd amount of damage.  The way east is now clear.  We keep our Mk IV frag supplies in good check.  The next area mostly consists of a small ruined building, possibly an old security checkpoint judging by the sandbags and broken turrets.  Having done some looking into stingball grenades, I decide it's probably worth picking up rubber balls from this point onward.  The rubble in the south has a small locked door, the wall of this place is also damaged enough that we could access with explosives, but that would be a waste.  There isn't much inside, but a digital timer is a nice find.  We can use it to replace our recently used TNT charge. Do note that each charge needs a whopping 5 TNT to make.  With that out of the way we continue eastwards towards Camp Hathor.  The next area is the outskirts of the old battery recycling plant. It is home to more bloody rathounds.  The entrance to this place is completely caved in, and there's no way to blast our way in.  Instead we can make use of the nearby vent. I think the fact that it's labelled as flimsy means that a multitool should be able to open this irrespective of your characters lockpick skill. Otherwise no character without lockpicking would be able to access this place.  The vents are small and safe here.  We pop out inside a small control station.  In a nearby desk we find a Circular Wave Amplifier, you can attach these to a shield emitter to improve their effectiveness in exchange for a worse battery life. This, to me, is a poor trade off.  We find a remote control for a utility bot. This will play into the main gimmick of this area.  Through the glass of the control room is a small robot. The doors to this room are locked and there's no way in there.  The remote control has two functions. We can use it to move the robot, and it can make the robot interact with things.  The monitor in the control room shows that there is a security camera in the bot, so while we stand in front of the monitor, our field of view will include the area around the robot.  So the gimmick is this, there are several power boxes scattered throughout the plant.  Each switch activates or deactivates electrified floors that cut you off from different parts of the facility.  So all you have to do is a guide the bot to the switches and work out which order of switches will get you further into the plant.  It's fairly simple and doesn't take much effort. Most other puzzles in this game will not be so forgiving. This game has some brutal puzzles.  You get the robot to touch the power station in the back room and it will becomes permanently short circuited, the power in the facility will switch off, and the doors in the control room will unlock.  Inside the facility we find some blueprints to make shock bolts. They are like having a long distance taser, highly useful if you use crossbows.  We find blueprints for Optoelectric Nuclear Batteries. We can't learn these ourselves, but Harold will be interested in this.  We find an Anatomically-Aware Scope, this is a pretty awesome weapon attachment, it improves your critical damage by 35% if you put it on an assault rifle and by 50% if you put it on a crossbow or sniper rifle. There wasn't much else in here, not even an oddity oddly enough, so we head back to SGS.  Home Sweet Home.  "About the battery recycling plant..." "Ah, yes?" "Yes, you'll love this. Here's a blueprint that contains something about optoelectric nuclear batteries. I think you'll find it useful." Harold's eyebrows shoot up at the mere sight of the thing you brought him. "Wow, what a lucky find. Great, lemme take a look at it." He inserts the drive into his portable computer and takes a look at it. "Hmm, I was hoping for some info on how to make our own battery, but this has got information on how to revive the dead ones. This is nearly as good. Ha, I never knew you could do that with a photovoltaic cell." "Great, glad you're happy." "As I promised, here's your reward." He gives you 300 SGS credits. "See you around, Henrietta."Nice and simple. Next time we will head to Camp Hathor and see what's happening there. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Jan 15, 2023 |
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Jan 15, 2023 02:55
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If you're a big fan of rathounds, this may be of interest...
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Jan 15, 2023 05:57
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| # ? Apr 16, 2024 13:22 |
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Broken image tags in the Email section...
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Jan 15, 2023 09:02
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