Last Tuesday (9/17/24 for Readers From The Future) the defining feature of the Milepost Zero update finally launched: the caravan system. I’m going to be honest and admit I haven’t engaged with it heavily since it has been quite the work week and gaming time has been in short supply, but I did get it started and wanted to go over the basics and why I’m actually excited about a system that adds infinite escort quests to the system. I mean don’t we all hate escort quests? I usually do, but so far not here.

First let’s talk about the meta a little bit. The basic idea is you send out a “caravan” (which is a single brahmin, at least at the start — brahmin’s being the 2-headed cows in the Fallout world) and it follows a path while attracting a ton of enemies that you have to kill to keep the brahmin safe. The brahmin basically does it’s own thing but you can interact with it to hurry it along which makes it run for a bit. I’m not yet sure if there’s a downside to using that too often.

The brahmin has a health bar and if it dies, the caravan fails and you have to start over.

So thing 1: a while back the devs changed the Medic affix (we call them affixes now, right?) to be a straight up healing effect. It used to be (I think, I can’t remember for sure) that having a Medic weapon increased the effectiveness of stimpacks and other incoming heals. Don’t shoot me if I’m wrong about that; I just remember that whatever it did, it was of no interest to me, the solo player. But speaking of shooting, what it now does is heal friendly players/NPCs. I have a legendary Medic’s shotgun that I held onto for no particular reason, but now I can use it to shoot my brahmin to heal it. It’s nice to have a use for the Medic’s affix.

Thing 2: When you start a caravan, it becomes a Public Event for that server that works like any other Public Event. Folks can teleport to you and help you protect your brahmin. That’s good both because more public events means more fun playing with others, but more importantly is that this Season the devs have added a post-Season Level 100 task where you get bonus Season XP when you complete 3 public events, and this task is repeatable (I’m told, I haven’t gotten to 100 yet). So this means folks wanting to grind the season pass past level 100 are going to want to do lots of Public Events and having a steady stream of them via the caravan system should help a lot with that.

So I kind of like how caravans pull together the Medic affix stuff and this new Season pass task. OK enough, let’s talk about the caravan system itself.

So the basic idea is you get involved with someone running an outpost that sits at the very south edge of the Shenandoah region that was added last June. You hire on as help and for every successful caravan you run you get paid in a new currency called “Supplies.” You can then spend Supplies to upgrade the outpost, hiring and upgrading workers who… I don’t know what they do yet, I only have one so far! I guess they make things more efficient/convenient? Eventually, as I understand it, you’ll take over the outpost and can decorate it and such; it becomes another base for you. From the very start it has some crafting stations and stuff so is a nice place to hang out anyway.

I’ve been a bit bored with Fallout 76 after maxing out my stats and getting good gear and putting together a build that could kind of take on almost anything aside from nuke-spawned world bosses. But the first time I ran a caravan, I died! It was awesome! The routes are somewhat dangerous just in the number of enemies, at least at first. I am still trying to suss out how many of the enemies spawn due to the caravan and how many are just there and are attracted to it (the point being the latter might not have respawned if you run a 2nd caravan immediately). It isn’t that any one of the baddies are particularly challenging, it’s just that there are a lot of them and you kind of have to get stuck right in if you want to keep the brahmin safe. No more leisurely picking baddies off one by one from a distance.

There’re also some Legendary enemies mixed in so you get some decent drops from doing them, which is always a plus and more so with the new Legendary Crafting system.

Caravans come in 3 sizes, small, medium and large. I’ve only done Small & Medium so far and honestly they didn’t feel that much different to me. Your first caravan of the day (?) is free if you go with small or medium. Subsequent caravans cost you caps to spawn, more caps for bigger caravans and the price increases with each subsequent run. While this might sound like a bad thing, Fallout 76 has a cap limit of 40,000 caps and I’m always near it, so spending a few hundred to a few thousand caps to run a caravan doesn’t seem like a big deal. I would guess the system is there to prevent folks from chain-running caravans for 48 hours straight, maxing out their outpost, and then complaining that there wasn’t enough content in the new system.

So overall and at first blush, I’m pretty happy with the new caravan system. We’ll see if it holds up as an entertaining way to spend time after I’ve dug into it more. It’s just really fun to have an open world event that brings in a variety of enemies (who, by the way, sometimes start fighting each other, allowing you just to hurry the brahmin along and out of range). For a filthy casual like me it appears that it’ll take me a while to get the outpost fully staffed and upgraded, and you know how I love progression systems!

Today is the last day of the current Fallout 76 Season which started back in June. (I think it was June 12th.) Tomorrow we all start back at 0 (after re-downloading the entire game this patch — the devs are trying to make the client smaller which is requiring a complete re-download). I haven’t watched any data mining videos this time out so I’m not sure what is in store for the new season.

To recap how season progression works (or at least, how it worked this season) in Fallout 76, you gain season experience by doing various daily and weekly tasks, and you earn 25 “Season Tickets” per season level. Every few levels from 0 to 100 a new page of prizes unlocks and you purchase whatever looks interesting with these tickets. Level 100 is considered “Complete” and then you get into “Bonus Levels.” Nothing more unlocks until level 150 when you get a selection of purchasable “consumable” style items, and you can buy these over and over as long as you have the tickets. These are things like Atoms (for the cash shop), Lunchboxes (which offer buffs when consumed) and Perk Points (used to level up Legendary Perks).

I was determined to get to level 150 and spend my tickets on Perk Points to level up those Legendary Perks and I did it. (That’s the final page of the season pass at the top of this post.) In fact yesterday I hit level 200. I’m past where all the Legendary Perks that I use are maxed and I have tickets to spare. Trying to decide what to spend them on. I could bank Perk Points in case I decide to switch my Legendary Perk cards, or I could spend these tickets on one of my alts. But 200 seems like a good stopping point so I am NOT logging into Fallout 76 today, for the first time since June.

I have some personal struggles around becoming obsessive about things and chasing these season levels has become something of an obsession. For the past month or so I’ve never really played Fallout 76 for fun. I’d just to log in, do the Daily & Weekly Tasks as efficiently & quickly as possible so as to max that Season level, then I’d go play something else for enjoyment. That’s how I ‘broke’ Fallout 76 for myself. On the one hand there’s a certain level of satisfaction in having hit this goal but on the other hand… why?

My character now is so OP that not much in the game makes me break a sweat. There’s group content I can’t solo because it requires doing several things at once, but in terms of combat only the world bosses that result from dropping nukes even offer a challenge. Bethesda says they are aware of this and they intend to add more challenging content soon.

But even without challenging enemies I could be playing for fun. Doing quests and content I haven’t done, trying new builds, or working on my CAMP to make it cool. But by forcing myself to do those tasks every time I log in, Fallout 76 has become just another chore for me to do every day, and I’m really sad about that.

This next season I’ll be aiming to hit 100, at most, and that only if there’s something really interesting on the level 100 unlock page. And I know that hitting 100 is pretty easy, if I could hit 200 this time, so I won’t sweat missing days now and then.

There’s also a new crafting system to explore and I’m going to burn through a TON of Legendary Items I have been saving which is going to empty my stash and my backpack so I won’t have to deal with being over-encumbered all the time.

Basically the promise I am making to myself is that, for this coming season, I’ll play Fallout 76 for the fun, not for the metrics or the challenge of hitting some arbitrary number.

Remember when I said I was done posting about Fallout 76? I officially retract that!!

So as mentioned, I’ve started playing Fallout 76 on Steam. Since Bethesda doesn’t offer any kind of cross-play or cross-progression, that meant starting over. These days you can start at level 20, which I did, but really the first 50 levels of Fallout is newbie-ville. I hit 30 last night. I don’t really have a build, I’m constantly low on ammo, I have no mutations, and I haven’t even really picked a weapon type to focus on yet. I use whatever I happen to have ammo for. Taking down a non-trivial enemy can take 3 or 4 reloads of a weapon.

But I haven’t stopped my Xbox Fallout 76 character. There I have a build that is very solid. I have quality gear, a ton of mutations (including marsupial that lets you jump really high) and more ammo than I know what to do with. Only the toughest enemies take more than 1 full clip of my railway rifle and many things get 1-shotted, though the railway fires so fast I usually waste a couple of rounds. On Xbox I’m level 320 or somewhere around there.

Currently there’s a two week campaign running where at the top of every hour there is a Mothman event at Pleasant Valley (where the legend of the Mothman first arose, apparently). The bulk of this event is guarding 3 pyres from enraged cultists. On the Xbox I generally pick a pyre and defend it easily. In fact other players just kind of get in my way. I find the event rather boring really, as there is zero challenge to it. (But. y’know, LOOT!) After the pyres are defended you have to get up to a rooftop to commune with the Mothman, which I do via just jumping a couple of times thanks to the marsupial super jump.

So after doing that, I log off the Xbox and log onto Steam and an hour later the event happens again and I fast travel to it and OMG it is SO hard! I basically have to be carried. The enraged cultists can kill me pretty quick, half the time I run out of ammo, and when I don’t it takes me so long to kill 1 cultist that 2 or 3 others in the same wave will have done serious damage to the pyre. I absolutely need help. Heck I even struggle in the preliminary part of the event where you’re killing deer and regular cultists. Then when the pyres have been defended and it is time to get up on the roof? I have to follow a bunch of ramps and stairs to get there and often, since I’m always encumbered, I don’t get there in time to commune with Wise Mothman! So sad. At least I still get the “Event Completed” but I don’t get the Mothman’s buff.

Going from one experience pretty nearly directly to the other just feels so entirely weird. I realize in a lot of ways you’d have the same experience just playing an alt, but playing Fallout 76 on the console feels different from playing on the PC, too. Plus on console I use a controller and on PC mouse and keyboard. So even things like the muscle memory I have from Xbox don’t really translate to the Steam version. It’s like a different game, only it’s the same. LOL

Honestly I find being the struggling newbie on Steam is more fun. I think part of the reason I’ve somewhat drifted away from the Xbox version of the game is I just get bored. I have a ton of quests to do but the combat in them is so easy that they all start to feel like fetch quests. Only when someone drops a nuke and an end-game boss comes out to play do things get really interesting. It was a hoot being really powerful for a while, but eventually you start to miss that challenge, y’know?

At QuakeCon there was a Fallout 76 panel and they did mention that they are aware that there is not enough difficult content in the game and they heavily implied that more will be added, so I’m looking forward to that. Until then I’ll keep being the newbie on Steam, getting underfoot and in the way of the old pros who could probably solo the event without too much difficulty!

While I never signed up or declared my intention to take part in Blaugust, on August 1st I got some FOMO and wrote a post. Then another on the 2nd, and another after that and here we are half-way through the month and I’ve kept it up. But my batteries are running down, mostly because half my team at work is on leave or vacation just as the summer lull is ending and projects are starting to heat up. One team member comes back next Tuesday so I THINK if I can get through to then, I might make the full month, but this week has been tough. (Plus GamesCom is next week which should provide plenty of blog fodder.)

All of which is a preamble to a short little post about a curious bug I ran into in the PC/Steam version of Fallout 76. Yes, now I’m playing Fallout 76 on Steam…did I mention that here? First I was going to play it on GeForce Now but then I got hooked (again!) and decided to install it locally.

So I was having a great time of it for a while, then suddenly I lost the ability to move. I was playing with a controller and at first thought it was a controller bug. I would turn and look around a bit and then suddenly I’d start moving again. I figured that was my cue to get used to playing with mouse and keyboard. But the same thing happened even after I’d set the controller aside. It hadn’t happened when I was playing on GeForce Now, though. And I noticed it seemed to happen more when I was in a building than when I was outside. I had installed a mod that was supposed to improve wide-screen support, so I disabled that (honestly I didn’t notice much different anyway…but FO76 could really improve its wide screen support). That didn’t fix the bug. But through continued messing with it I discovered that it mostly happened when I looked down to loot a body, and looking up at the sky would often fix it.

To keep a short post short, it turns out it was a framerate issue. When I looked down at the ground, or when I was inside an enclosed area, the framerate went so high the that game just seemed to freak out and couldn’t keep up or something. THAT was when I remembered that I’d followed YouTuber AngryTurtle’s advice to change a setting in the Fallout76Prefs.ini file. The specific setting was iPresentInterval=1 which we were told to set to iPresentInterval=0 to make the game run much better. Which in fact it does…it apparently turns off the FPS cap and the game’s built in VSYNC. But it maybe does TOO good a job?

The solution is either to just turn that back to 1, or to use the Nvidia control panel to cap the framerate. I did the latter, setting max framerate to 144 fps which is what my monitor runs at. I had a bit of screen tearing when I looked down and ran, so I also turned on Nvidia Vsync. That fixed the issue for me.

It was just such a weird bug that rather than annoy me, I found it kind of amusing and fascinating (OK I mostly felt that way AFTER I solved it). If any devs wander by I’d love to hear a theory as to why too high a framerate would make a game engine just sit down and cry like this!

I thought I was done talking about Fallout 76 for a while but now we have some actual news courtesy of Quake Con, which is happening this weekend.

The next update, called Milepost Zero, is coming on September 3rd, which means the current season runs for 3 more weeks, ending on September 2nd. I can snag a lot more Perk Packs if I keep doing all the daily and weekly tasks for those three weeks!

In addition to the new season, there’s a new Legendary Crafting system that I’m a little wary of. It comes out on Sept 3rd as well. The general idea seems to be to give us more control over what we craft (right now it is pure RNG where we spend Legendary Modules and just HOPE we get the mods we want) and that’s a good thing, but the system is on the test server now and they seem to still be iterating and changing it in pretty big ways, and three weeks isn’t all that much time. I’m just a little worried the system is going to be wonky when it first launches, though I’m confident it’ll keep getting refined and improved after launch.

I haven’t played on the test server (since I play on Xbox) but it sounds like you’ll need to scrap Legendary Items that you get as drops for a “very small” (quote from one of the dev team on a Quake Con live stream) chance that you’ll learn the recipe to craft the mod for one of the Legendary Perks that were on that item. This leads me to believe that when the system is brand new, none of us are going to be crafting Legendary Gear for a while since first we’ll need to scrap a ton of stuff to learn the recipes. Fortunately I’m in a pretty good space for Legendary Weapons right now. The Legendary Mods you craft can be traded to other players so some lucky players who unlock recipes early are going to be rolling in caps from selling Mods.

There’s also a new game system coming for the update where you run a branch of the Blue Ridge Caravan Company. I haven’t seen a lot of details about that but it sounds like you’ll have to put together an Outpost, similar to your C.A.M.P., and then you can spawn caravans and will have to escort them to keep them safe. Other players can join in and help with the escort and these are intended to be farmable so I guess you’ll be able to fire them off as frequently as you want. I’m sure we’ll get more details on this system closer to launch.

Now that I’ve been doing a lot more PC gaming I’m kind of tempted to switch to the PC version of Fallout 76 for the new season. (I sure wish Bethesda would offer cross-progression for both FO76 and Elder Scrolls Online!) Tempted, but not sure it is wise. I have a lot of time invested in my Xbox account, and I bought a full year of Fallout 1st back in April so it is probably silly to walk away from the 7 months of remaining paid-for time. Maybe I just should dabble on PC this next season with an aim towards moving over completely sometime in Winter or next Spring, but not doing so until I have a PC character semi-established. Not sure I want to play without Fallout 1st, though… I guess I have time to sort this all out, though.

Anyway that’s it for today. A quick Fallout 76 post for a lazy Sunday!