DLC #150 - Fallout 4 - Contraptions Workshop

After the tribulations surrounding the Wasteland Workshop DLC, I was more hopeful of better fortunes for what is sort of, but not quite, the final piece of DLC within Fallout 4.

Contraptions Workshop, just like Wasteland Workshop, focuses again on the creation element of Fallout, and adds a host of new objects to build in order to unleash upon your settlements.

This package also adds 3 new trophies, which are thankfully both much easier to achieve, and less strenuous on the scavenger hunting necessary for the Wasteland Workshop content.

The focus is still based around building some of these new contraptions you'll have at your disposal as part of this package, but the big difference here is that you won't require anywhere near the level of raw resources to build what you'll need in order to achieve all 3 trophies and complete this list. 

They're also way less glitchy. I didn't have a single issue making any of these trophies pop, in comparison to the trial and error nature of Wasteland Workshop, which, in turn, led to a much swifter completion.

You'll need to build a Weapon, Armor and Power Armor rack - as well as displaying one relevant item on each for 1 trophy, as well as building a Pillory and assigning a settler to it for another - both of which required resources I mostly had, but even a short trip to a trader sorted out the small amount of missing resources I needed.

The final trophy just requires you to produce 100 objects from a builder - A device which can be loaded with raw materials to make certain objects, which can then in turn be recycled through the builder, which is perfect for creating the 100 objects necessary for the trophy.

I would estimate this took me around 45 minutes. A very welcome change of pace to finish off this Fallout 4 DLC set. I do still have some unfinished business in the form of Far Harbor, to go back and grab a glitched trophy, but that will formally seal things off.

DLC #149 - Fallout 4 - Wasteland Workshop

*Sigh*

"Up to 15 Minutes" for completion time in the particular guide I read.

I did come with the understanding that this wasn't technically the reality, based on the fact that this was under the assumption you had already acquired every material necessary to craft the items pertaining to the Wasteland Workshop - and merely needed to build them.

However, I didn't anticipate running into a package full of some traditional glitchy Fallout goodness, which stacked the hours on top.

Before I jump the gun any further, this piece of DLC focuses on some of the new contraptions introduced as part of the Wasteland Workshop, along with 3 new trophies, which take a specifically closer look at animal cages and arena fighting.

There are a couple of prerequisites to note.

Firstly, you will require a pretty hefty shopping list of items in order to build all of the contraptions that correlate to the 3 trophies on offer. These will mostly be for the 15 different types of animal cages you will need to build, and will require you to possess some unusual meats, such as Yao Guai, Stingwing and Radstag meat, which is both hard to farm in the natural wasteland and to buy from traders due it's rarity. Mirelurk Eggs and Nuclear Material can also be a pain to find, but this part of the process is the most time consuming element of this package. You may have alot of these materials already from playing through the game, but as someone who doesn't like to horde junk, and not being that aware of how useful it would come to be, I needed alot of resources, which costs both time and money.

Secondly, you'll need to have invested your skill points into 2 specific skills within the Charisma skill ladder - Animal Friend at level 5 and Wasteland Whisperer all the way down at level 9 - in order to build some of the objects you'll need to tame these creatures. If you don't have them, you'll need to reset your characters statistics and re-distribute accordingly.

The process of collecting all the resources I needed took me around 3-4 hours, due to the aforementioned fact that I never saw the benefit of hoarding junk up until now, and therefore had to spend the time acquiring this vast list of items, so I'd spent this amount of time already without technically getting going. Fun start.

But it's only 3 trophies, and I'd read "15 minutes" so at least we were almost done...

Except we weren't, and whilst the 3 trophies on offer don't really "stand out" per their requirements being complicated, time-consuming or any other form of challenge any given trophy could take the form of - They were just terribly glitchy and problematic in the same way that Fallout games always seem to be.

You get the first trophy for having 5 tamed creatures in a settlement. No problem. Just build any animal cage, power it up with a generator, build an emitter which tames the creature (this is the object you need the special perks for, to be able to build), and the cage will spawn a tamed creature every 3-4 times you sleep for 12 hours.

This went to plan, until my settlers started randomly attacking my tamed creatures, which is detrimental to progress given the fact you have to have 5 creatures tamed simultaneously, and not in total, and every time you need to breed a new tamed creature from the animal cage, you have to "repair" it, which means sourcing more meat from a specific animal which I had already done in preparation for a later trophy. So I was suddenly scavenger hunting again.

Anyway, repeat the process, and then find out that different species of tamed animals will also attack each other, whilst continuing to be attacked by settlers whose natural reaction to this is to also get involved, and all of a sudden, we're back at square one again. There's no way to control which type of creature comes out of an animal cage. I used the Insect cage for this trophy, and ended up spawning Radroach, Bloatfly and Stingwing - Not a good combination apparently.

I eventually stocked up on Mole Rat Meat and went through a constant loop of just pumping out tamed creatures and hoping something stuck, which did eventually get me the trophy at the expense of another 1-2 hours of my time. "15 minutes" it said.

Moving on though, there's also a trophy awarded for starting a spectated arena fight in a settlement, another trophy with simple face value requirements, which also turned out to be anything but.

You can create 2 podiums (red and blue), assign 2 settlers to these podiums, and they will then ensue a fight to the death, which should in turn trigger the trophy. No problem.

Except, after carrying this task out on a settlement so often to the point that there wasn't physically anybody left to fight each other anymore, and still not seeing the trophy pop, I find out that some theories suggest you also need to build a Clocking-off Siren, which, when triggered, summons settlers to the arena area in order to spectate the fight, which is apparently a critical trophy trigger.

So, we reloaded, in order to regain our decimated settlement, and tried this out. Build the podiums. Again. Assign the settlers. Again (which is also glitchy as fuck, because they always run into invisible obstacles or just refuse to move). This time though, we then build this Clocking-off Siren, power it up and activate it and then watch the fight. And nothing happens. Just another dead settler and no trophy.

I then read up and find out that it is possible there are more triggers to this trophy, and large parts of the difficulties faced here are around the general cloudiness of what works vs what doesn't matter, and that you need to make sure the combatants don't see each other before they fight (which usually triggers a premature shootout), AND there needs to be an official spectator to the witness the fight. So I have to build an actual arena that has enclosures to ensure both fighters can't see each other when assigned to the podium and prior to the Siren being sounded (which summons the crowd). There also has to be adequate seating made available, which is populated by other settlers when the Siren goes off.

So I end up building, not exactly an elaborate arena, but something more extensive than I expected was necessary, to only then find out other stuff would occur that just didn't make sense. Settlers would stray from their assigned podium, settlers wouldn't seat themselves and react to the Siren properly and they would still somehow start shooting prematurely, even behind metal walls. The inconsistencies were rife and I was yet another 1-2 hours deep tackling what I now believed was a deliberate mindfuck and that this was the underlying challenge.

I did eventually discover that, it was easier to summon the settlers to watch FIRST, and then assign anybody who wasn't sat down to fight. Even though this still triggered a premature fight, I think they fact that some settlers were seated and started cheering when they saw the fighting was the trigger for the trophy, but I never actually read that method anywhere and merely drew my own conclusions - but at least it worked.

The final trophy just requires you to build one of every type of cage, of which there are 15 and this is where all those resources gathered are needed. This one was actually quick and didn't spring any unwanted surprises, so at least we finished up on a positive note, albeit around 8 hours into a package that absolutely shouldn't have taken anywhere near that long.

This led to pure inconvenience in the end, and even though I was never a big fan of the Workshop element of this game before, this package actually gave me reasons to actively dislike it. However, it gets us one step closer to an end that I'm glad is finally in sight.

DLC #148 - Fallout 4 - Vault-Tec Workshop

Contrary to my own beliefs, I thought I was done with the story-driven content within the Fallout 4 DLC, and it actually turns out that this wasn't the case.

I went purely off the fact that every other DLC within this set concluding with the word "Workshop", cannot be story-driven, and rather focuses on the biggest new addition to the Fallout series - the workshop creation tool, which is also heavily used within the main game.

I won't go into the details of this mechanic here. It's better suited to explain for some of the trophies within the main list, but with the bigger picture in mind, this piece of DLC makes lighter use of it compared to the main game, due to it's relatively short nature.

This DLC pack takes you to Vault 88, which is the main setting for this piece of DLC. After responding to an emergency radio frequency requesting assistance, you will be led to Vault 88, where you meet the Vault Overseer after clearing the emergency (which turns out to be as simple as clearing a group of Raiders around the perimeter of the vault, along with some debris that has blocked the vault exit).

It turns out the Overseer locked up within already had her own plans for Vault 88, but they required people, and since nobody could previously enter or exit the Vault, these plans weren't possible. This triggers a quest-line which sees you take on a handful of quests to populate the Vault and use workshops in order to create experimental equipment and study the behaviours of the Vault 88 inhabitants as you recruit them, with their sole purpose as test subjects to measure the effects of this newly built equipment the questline will take you through.

It honestly isn't as interesting as it sounds like it could be - It mostly just seems like a way to showcase some of the new Workshop objects you can create which have been added as part of this pack, with the questline somewhat secondary to all of this.

This pack does only contain 3 trophies too, and they're all progression-based as you work your way through what turns out to be an adventure of around 2-3 hours upon entering Vault 88.

You'll be awarded  a trophy for completing a quest which requires you to unlock all build areas of the vault, which is effectively just clearing them of the enemies that inhabit them and finding the control panel for the Workshop to start functioning again, as well as a trophy for equipping a jumpsuit and a pip-boy on a dweller, which you can do once you progress to the point where you start accepting outsiders to populate the vault.

The final trophy is awarded upon completion of the final quest, whereby the Overseer will promote you to her position. It is possible to talk her down with certain dialogue options, which will actually deny you the trophy, and you'll have to end up killing her instead if you want it.

I'm not a big fan of the Workshop feature, but it's nicely worked into a questline here, which blends together well. The remaining few DLC packs also focus on Workshops, but this here wraps up the quest-based content for good.

DLC #147 - Fallout 4 - Nuka-World

We've had to slightly deviate a bit here.

The original plan was to move through the story-driven content amongst this batch of Fallout 4 DLC, in order to reach level 50, and unlock any other additional trophies missing from the main list along the way.

This was going to plan, with the completion of the Automatron DLC, followed by an attempt at Far Harbor - Where, unfortunately, I ran into a glitch that has prevented me progressing towards the sole trophy I had left from that list, and will need to restart that particular piece of DLC in order to go back through and gather the remaining trophy necessary to finish the pack.

Starting a new game at that stage would have gone against the goal of reaching level 50 on my current game, and thus, I have decided to park Far Harbor and will return to finish it at some point later on.

With that, the natural next step was to come onto Nuka-World, which adds 10 new trophies and is the final piece of story-driven DLC within Fallout 4.

Nuka-World is an old amusement park, located just outside the Commonwealth, and the pack starts with the player being lured into a trap by a raider masquerading as a civilian, claiming that his family is being held hostage within Nuka-World by raiders. After agreeing to assist, the player runs a gauntlet, kills the Overboss of Nuka-World at the gauntlet finale, and then suddenly finds themselves in control of the entire park as the new Overboss.

It quickly becomes apparent that 3 main gangs still inhibit Nuka-World, co-existing, but still fractious towards one another, and the main story arc revolves around the player being tasked with gaining control over sub-areas of the park and delegating these out towards the various gangs in order to appease them and expand their influence on Nuka-World through possession of territory. These sub-areas are all wildly different with specific themes, and each adds a good change of pace to the questline as you progress through.

Out of the 10 trophies on offer, 4 of these are dedicated to the new story-arc, spanning across 11 individual quests, which provides a much more in-depth story-driven experience than the Automatron DLC (and Far Harbor, for that matter). It will take anywhere between 8-10 hours to take back control of each area of Nuka-World, and eventually reach the inevitable conclusion the story culminates with, and whilst this is generally a very straight-forward, relaxed adventure, the other trophies outside of those awarded for completing story quests make it a fairly time consuming package.

The rest of the trophies will have you clambering around Nuka-World and back across the Commonwealth performing a variety of miscellaneous tasks - Completing 12 generic quests given to you by the 3 gang leaders within Nuka-World along with establishing 8 raider camps within the commonwealth will grant you a couple of trophies, and you'll also have collect 20 unique recipes of Nuka-Cola variants hidden around Nuka-World, along with the resources required to craft them for a couple more trophies. This will then, in turn, require you to kill 40 Nuka-World creatures whilst under the influence of these concocted Nuka-Cola drinks.

These extra-curricular activities probably take the same amount of time as it does to complete the main questline, if not a little bit longer. Collecting Nuka-Cola recipes and crafting them is a nice little addition which keeps things fresh enough, but performing very boring and generic quests for gang leaders and setting up raider outposts is less so, and feel more of a chore at this point of playing the game, when you've seen these bland quests far too much already.

There is also another trophy awarded for redeeming 100,000 Nuka-Cade tokens in the Nuka-Cade, which requires continuously playing the same arcade game over and over on a loop in order to raise these tokens -  a grind of around 3/4 hours in itself.

The standard difficulty of the enemies you'll encounter and the tasks at hand aren't anything to write home about, but it is a piece of DLC that probably floats somewhere in the region of 20-25 hours, which is a generous time sink. I did also manage to unlock the "Legends Of The Wastes" trophy, awarded for reaching level 50, half-way through the contents of this pack, so we've at least managed to achieve what we set out to achieve upon strategically working our way around these DLC packs - Even if it has meant we're going to have to go back to Far Harbor at some point...