This thread is derailed. Let's Play Underrail

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Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Chapter 5 - The Newtonian Catastrophe.

Music - City Station

Last time we leveled up!

At level 3 we get no new feats, just skill more points to spend.

Nothing terribly exciting about this level up, just slowly increasing our chemistry, I actually want my mechanics and tailoring to be a lot higher by this point. But there's a lot worth focusing on this early in the game and I'm just one man.

I head back to Lucas to pick up some more grenades, a pile of throwing daggers, and the ingredients to make more grenades, the blue prints for a frag grenade, some T.N.T., some empty frag cases and some more powerful explosive agent called hexogen.

This is essentially how crafting works, you learn the blueprint, each blueprint has primary slots and potentially some secondary slots, in a frag grenades case, it needs a frag case and a type of explosive, those are its primary slots To its secondary slot, you can add extra type of explosive. Then as long as you meet the skill requirements, you can make the item. In this case we still need 5 more mechanics skill, so we can't even make basic hand grenades, which is annoying.

If we put some more TNT in the secondary slot, we can make Mk II frag grenades, we want to get these pretty soon as they are very effective at this stage. Very little can survive a hit from one of these.

If we use hexogen as the primary explosive we can make Mk III grenades, we will hopefully get at least these before we finish the early game.

If we added T.N.T. to this or Hexogen to T.N.T. you can make Mk IV grenades. If you're intelligent enough and can get your Chemistry to an effective 69, you can make these before we finish the early game. They are crazy powerful this early on, and can serve you well for drat near the whole game.

Note, the actual order you place the hexogen and TNT actually affects how expensive the chemistry skill you need to make MK IV, but 69 Chemistry is the smaller of the two. Just a quirk relating to how the game calculates the required skill based on whether an item is primary or secondary. I forget which is which, but it doesn't matter.

If you double up on hexogen, you can make Mk V frags, the best frag grenades you can make, and they are good, but 112 chemistry is a heavy investment. Probably only really worth it if you have really high intelligence and or making explosives is a key part of your build as opposed to a good secondary weapon though.

Making a purely mad bomber build is a pretty good one actually, you can even get a belt on DOMINATING difficulty that will just set off each kind of grenade you have strapped to your belt in an explosion around you. Just stick 6 stacks of Mk V frags to your pants and watch the fireworks. As effective as it is hilarious, presumably.

I go back to my room and store my hexogen for a later date.

I go down to Ezra and pick up the blueprints for a Taser and the cheapest quality power core and shock generator components I could find. Sadly I find that my electronics skill is just a few points shy of being able to build it. So we will have to wait to make one. This thing will be a game changer for us.

I go see Harold and pick up two of the most important blueprints in the game, Recycle Item and Repair Kit. Recycle item will let you break down any weapon or armor piece into either metal scraps, fabric scraps, or electronic scraps. You can then use 40 of these scraps to make a repair kit of whatever kind. Add an additional 40 and you can make advanced repair kits on top of that.

Sadly what I really need more than anything in this build are tailoring repair kits, and currently my tailoring skill is too low to recycle items or make any repair kits. Hopefully I manage to address this soon, as our weapons and armor will see a lot of wear and tear over the course of this game. I'm also going to need tons of fabric scraps to make throwing nets as well, which take about 50 fabric scraps to make 1 net.

Anyway, we head back down to see Big Bret about his hopper problem.

"I've been tasked with helping you with the 'hopper round up.'"

"Very good. So, say, have you ever captured a hopper?"

"No."

Many times, actually. But we'll go over the basics.

"Ah. First go to the storage room - it's the room with two entrances just across
the hallway - and get some dog crates. You'll need them to hold your quarry."

Already done.

"Getting them inside won't be easy, though. As soon as they sense you're coming they'll scurry off and crawl through the crevices in the cave wall. So what you need to do is immobilize them before they run away, either with hopper traps - which unlike bear traps will ensnare them without snapping most of their bones in half - or with throwing nets."

This is a little overkill to be honest. Hoppers are very easy to catch with your bare hands.

"Also, if you can handle a crossbow, you could try shooting them with tranquilizing bolts. A single shot will drop a hopper quickly and will allow you to capture it easily. Now, you'll find all of these in the storage room, and you are free to take as many as you need. But if you need more than what's in the storage room, then, well, I can only sell it to you."

We won't be wasting precious our trade fodder on catching hoppers.

"Your hunting ground is the Mushroom Cove. Head south from the Crossroad Watch until you reach a waterfall. Go past the waterfall and take the western tunnel in a cave after it. Now, you'll come across a big cavern with a lake. That's
the Cove. I'll need three healthy specimens. Good luck."

It's not hard to miss it, all the other caverns are caved in at the moment.

"Oh, and by the way: I've also sent a young man called Newton to catch some hoppers. It's been a while, so see if you can find him and learn what's taking him so long."

Rescue Newton, check.

"Why do you need more hoppers? Looks like you have plenty back there."

"Inbreeding makes hoppers susceptible to disease. It is necessary to freshen up the gene pool with new specimens
as often as possible."

I believe its meant to be somewhat of an important plot point that food is pretty scarce and becoming scarcer in Underrail. Although this is never really reflected all that heavily in the game. Food, after all, is a pretty reasonably priced commodity and there's plenty of fishing, hunting and agriculture. We also never really find people starving to death, despite some extreme poverty conditions too, and the roving cannibal gangs seem more like hobbiests to me.

"What is the Mushroom Cove?"

"It's a place where a couple of streams and rivers join up to form a cove. From there the water flows further down as Celeritas River which is joined by other streams and rivers and becomes more and more treacherous as it journeys on. Presumably it leads straight down into Deep Caverns and ends in a magnificent waterfall, but I'm not sure I believe that."

Sounds wonderful.

"Who's Newton?"

"Well, he's just like you, a newcomer who needs to learn the basics of what it takes for this station to operate. I've sent him to catch hoppers; he should have been back by now, though. I hope he hasn't gotten himself into some sort of trouble."

"So please, look for him while you're there."

"I'll get right on it."

We're all set, so it's back out into the caverns with us.

Music - Caves

This time we head south of crossroads cave.

And we have arrived in the wilderness.

There's a little ruin in this area with some junk to rummage about it.

We find some Soft Foam Padding, which you can add to most armors to give it a bit more stealth skill.

An adaptive lens, which can be used when making various goggles, or an optical fiber endoscope to see under doorways.

There's also some rubble ball bearings here which I believe you can use to make sting ball grenades, which I've never used before.

To the east of our position we can find a lovely little pond with some fireflies flitting about it, very peaceful.

We move south into the next area, and begin sneaking.

We soon stumble upon Mole Crickets! These things are so weak they're barely worth talking about.

They're slow and they do so little damage it almost always gets absorbed, despite doing acid damage, which we have no resistance too.

As I mentioned previously, they are also pretty rare. We may well be driving them into extinction.

We can see the rubble blocking us from heading further south.

In a nearby barrel we pick up some old coveralls, which we can break down into scraps.

We arrive at an intersection, both ways will ultimately lead to the same place, we head down the south passage first.

In this section we find the very last of the Mole Crickets, they won't ever re-spawn, I don't think and the only other places you can potentially find them is in the random side caverns, which I don't think we found any that have them.

One of them drops an Insectoid Salivarium, which we can to to get Insect Saliva. This is used largely to make healing hypos. But any insect enemy can potentially drop these.

We make our way west.

We arrive at a crossroads. The sign points us back towards, SGS, Mushroom Cove, Junkyard and a place to the east called Camp Hathor. Camp Hathor is currently cut off due to the earthquakes.

If we head north we end up in this small stretch of water with a ladder you can climb. This is route we would have ended up at if we had gone west instead of south at the t-junction earlier. I like this screen, its nice to watch the water crash up against the stalagmites.

Heading back south to the crossroads again we run into a sentry guard.

"Henrietta, the new girl."

He nods and takes his finger off the trigger. "Yeah, I recognize you now. What are you doing out here?"

"I've been instructed to round up some hoppers from the Mushroom Cove. Am I heading the right way?"

"Yes, yes, you are. It's just beyond this passage. Be careful, though, as there are psi beetles in the Cove area."

"I somehow got the impression that Mushroom Cove was much closer to SGS."

"You know, lots of people have been telling me that recently. Newcomers like you. No idea why, though. It's not
like the Cove has moved or anything like that. He shrugs
his shoulders. Strange."

I'm guessing that Mushroom Cove was originally in a different spot in an earlier build of this game. But I dunno it's always been where it currently is when I started playing this game.

"Did you happen to see a young man go into the Mushroom Cove? Newton's the name."

"Yes, he went through here recently. I'd say... about two hours ago or so. He said he was going to catch some cave hoppers. He hasn't returned yet, though."

That seems concerning.

"You mentioned psi beetles..."

"Yes, psi beetles. Nasty buggers. Especially if they are in a group, because that's when they start slinging powerful psionics at you."

"You know, if you haven't already, talk to Old Jonas at the Crossroads. He knows a lot about the creatures lurking in these caves and could give you some important tips. Who knows, it might save your life."

"In any case, stick to the eastern bank and you should be safe. Nasty buggers..."

"What do you know about that scavenger from Mushroom Cove?"

"Not much, to tell you the truth. Gerald, guard, found him dying in the Cove. It all happened before my shift."

"And where can I find this Gerald?"

"He's probably sleeping. Yeah, long shift. But I think Malcom was on duty at the time. He nods. Better ask him for more info on your way back."

I don't think Gerald exists in this game. As as I can tell we'll be given more information from Pasquale back at SGS, once we progress a little further in the game on who to talk to next with the mushroom cove scavenger quest.

"I will. Thanks for the warning."

He nods. "Good hunting."

And we've arrived in Mushroom Cove. It's hard to tell but there's small caves along the north cavern wall where cave hoppers will periodically pop out of and head for piles of cave mushrooms and slowly eat them. If we get too close they will immediately run back into their caves.

So all we have to do is place a hopper trap outside of their cave entrance and wait.

And the hopper is safely immobilized. It we had used bear traps, the thing would have been pulverized.

Then we just have to use the dog carrier on it, and we've got ourselves a cave hopper.

We repeat the process to catch our second.

To catch the last one, since we don't have any more traps left, we just instead wait for a hopper to run close by and enter combat and then swiftly run up to it and catch it in the dog carrier. Simple.

Next I start stalking more cave hoppers so I can kill a few of them to try and make them drop their oddity.

It's a relatively rare drop and you want to be careful when trying to harvest it.

The reason being, you want to make sure you kill a cave hopper in a single turn.

If you don't, the cave hopper with run away from you and you'll be stuck in combat whilst its close by. Cave hoppers are fast so they're hard to chase down if one slips away. And it will constantly start combat again if you get near it in the future. Thankfully, other hoppers don't go aggro if you attack nearby hoppers.

After killing about 8 of them, I finally get their oddity. The cave dragon tail, I'd say I was lucky finding it so quickly this time round.

There a small island we can reach by crossing some shallows, where a gentleman is fishing.

"You're that girl that was running Tanner's tests, right. Henrietta, was it?
I guess you got admitted."

"Yeah, and who're you?"

The indifferent expression persists. "I'd tell you that, but then I'd have to kill you. Just call me Mordre."

"In that case, Mordre will do."

You can try to intimidate Mordre here, but I don't think its possible to succeed. He always just calmly replies that we wouldn't want to fight him.

"Good."

"What is this place?"

"It's called Mushroom Cove. But it's basically a big lake where all these little streams converge and form the Celeritas River. It then runs all the way down to the very bottom of the Deep Caverns."

We'll soon going to be able to write our doctoral thesis on the geography of Mushroom Cove at this rate.

"So how's the fishing going?"

"Could be better. I was hoping to catch some deep eels, but I forgot to bring meat, and the eels don't care for worms
much; use those only if you want to drown them."

This is why we brought that cave hopper meat with us from the kitchen, although given the number of hoppers we just killed we really needn't have bothered.

"Tell me about deep eels."

"There are many kinds of deep eels. Most are delicious and very easy to cook and eat. The blue eel is everyone's
favorite, including me."

"The further you go down the Celeritas, however, the more dangerous eels you find. It's the very nature of this world of ours - the deeper you go, the more dangerous it becomes."

He ain't lying.

"That's a nice cigar you have there."

"Thanks."

"Where did you get them? It must've cost a lot."

"I have ways, and the cost, it's not as much as you'd think." He draws a smoke, and his expression improves. "I enjoy smoking here. No one to complain, no one to ask for a cigar."

"Got a spare cigar?"

"No."

He draws another smoke.

Mordre actually does smoke the cigar too! He gains a small buff from it, actually a lot of people who hang around bars and restaurants in this game will occasionally gain small buffs from the food and drink they consume. It's neat.

"What kind of meat do you need?"

"Any meat will do, but raw red meat works best. I could hunt down a hopper, but I cannot leave the rods unattended."

"I've got some meat right here."

"Good. Do you want to trade it?"

"What can you offer?"

"How about a health hypo?"

Mordre will not accept the meat for free and if our mercantile were higher we could haggle for two hypos, not a big deal for us as we just want the xp.

"Sounds fair. I'll take it."

"Good."

"Now to catch some eels."

"I'll leave you to it. Good luck."

We'll learn more about who Mordre is much later on.

For now we will move on, we could head south and explore more of the cove, but it's a bit dangerous for us right this second.

Instead we'll make out way west along the northern shoreline.

We soon find ourselves approaching some sort of structure, with a young psi beetle scurrying about.

We throw a net over it and make short work of it.

Further up ahead is something far more deadly, a fully grown psi beetle.

I try to sneak in closer.

And a bloody cave hopper bumps into me, ruining my stealth, how typical.

Not really having much in the way of a plan, I just charge as close to the psi beetle as I can.

The adult variants hit harder and more often than the young ones.

After a single round of combat, we've barely hurt it.

I use a throwing net to give me more of an edge and heal myself before it can make my brain explode.

Unfortunately I kept too close to the beetle and it shut its brain away. And my non-critical punches aren't good enough to damage it at all.

Also my combat gloves are starting to get badly damaged too.

After barely finishing off our first proper psi beetle, I patch up our gloves with our two tailoring kits.

In some nearby rubble we find our first trilobite fossil oddity.

There's also a periscope part oddity in a barrel on the nearby dock platform thing.

There appears to be a suspicious blood stain nearby this door. I think Newton might have gone this way.

More blood on the inside.

Welcome to the deciding point of a DOMINATING run, this place is as far as you'll go if you don't know what you're doing on the hardest difficulty. There's far too many psi beetles and unlike on this difficulty, DOMINATING psi beetles aren't deaf, so they will just swarm you as you fail to kill one of them.

On the shelves nearby we find a galvanic vest, which you can use to make various armors, it provides you with electrical resistance.

A smart lens, that can be added to goggle recipes to improve ranged special attacks.

And the oddity, a Warehouse Inventory List. We're slowly coming up on another level. We will likely get there before we leave this place.

We also find the frame for a Jaguar SMG, and a mold used to craft a machete. The game is short on details on how exactly we manage to produce some of the crafting recipes in this game. I guess we just carry a portable blast furnace around with us at all times.

Sneaking into the building proper, it looks like we're in an old storage facility. There's a young psi beetle nearby, shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Further in we find another psi beetle, and we begin the dance of punching it in the brain.

It nearly kills us.

And it looks like another beetle was close enough to see all the hubub.

It's getting really dicey now!

I hit a hypo and kite it round the corner.

I then remember not to hoard grenades and make things easier for me.

The blood trail leads further into the building. The rubble pile up north is sometimes the entrance to a random area. We explore a nearby office.

We find a 9mm Hammer, some 9mm rounds and an electric light that you can strap to your belt. I'm not sure it would be all that useful in most situations.

In the back of the office we find an old diver's helmet oddity, which is enough to push us to level 4.

At level 4 we gain a free stat point. We put this into our dexterity, so we hit and crit more often.

I up my electronics high enough to make a taser but forget to make one. I also haven't boosted my mechanics yet, because I also forgot to do that too. I'm good at this game.

We take the feat, lightning punches, which allows to hit even more often, so long as we keep our armor penalty low. This has basically locked us into staying in leather armors for the rest of the game. That's okay, plenty of good leather armors.

We also find a blueprint for a flashbang, which you make by combining a thin grenade case with some magnesium. Good for keeping people off of your back, they only stun for one turn though and the effect will also wear of if you hit a stunned person. But better than nothing.

We pass by another explosive barrel that would have been a good way to deal with some of the beetles if we'd managed to sneak up on them. Oh well.

In the backroom we find a badly injured Newton.

"Are you Newton? Big Bret sent me out to look for you. You've been out of SGS for a while now."

"Yes, yes! I'm Newton. Don't even mention Big Bret to me. He sent me to catch those stupid hoppers. I guess I went too far to the west and ran into psi-bugs. He never told me about them!"

"Why didn't you run away?"

"I did! I started running... around. Hey, the bugs surrounded me! I ended up in this plac-- He clenches his teeth in pain. Aaahhhh... and I cut my leg somewhere along the way. I stopped the stupid bleeding, but I can barely walk."

Newton seems like a bit of a walking liability.

"Why the hell are we still talking? Can you get rid of all those drat bugs so I can safely get outta here? I can't run and I most certainly can't fight."

"They're all dead. Let's get you out of here."

If you manage to sneak all the way to newton without killing all the beetles, and you're persuasive enough, you can just lie to Newton and he'll leave, but all the Beetles will be waiting for you at the entrance next to his corpse. Just one of the many ways diplomacy doesn't lead to better outcomes in this game.

"Great! GREAT! I wanna get the hell outta here as soon as possible. He rushes past you, dragging his injured leg
behind him."

"Wait for him to limp away."

With that all out of the way we can start heading back.

Incidentally, this is what the map of this game looks like. It can be a little disorienting at first, but it can tell you some good information, like what plants and animals you have discovered in particular areas, in case you need to harvest some particular ingredients. Or which areas are best avoided.

We could head back to SGS right now, but I might keep exploring up north for a bit and clear a bit of a path to Junkyard first.

Everything seems relatively peaceful so far.

We notice a crevice we can peek inside. You can occasionally look through some objects in this game. You can even TAB whilst in that view to see what objects lie in that area.

Interesting, there's a trapdoor on the other side. We'll be checking that out later.

Up ahead we stumble on two psi beetles near a small island. If we were perceptive enough, we could notice some shallow rocks we could cross to reach that island.

I was feeling reckless so I lobbed a grenade at the beetles as a cessation of all peaceful proceedings.

The beetles synergise, but still don't manage to pull off any fancy new psi powers.

I manage to kill one without too much difficulty.

But the sound of grenade going off has attracted some rathounds to the scene. We're surrounded!

I decide to deal with the psi beetle threat first, because rathounds aren't a big deal. Although something looks odd about the rathound on the right there.

That's because it's not a rathound, it's a rathound alpha. They're bigger, meaner, faster and tougher. They can also do this nasty rend attack, which both hurts a lot and also gives us a bleeding debuff. It was also in pack hunting mode too so it's going to hit us hard.

So on top of all the damage we are now taking damage every turn. Time for some crowd control to reposition ourselves.

I throw down a flare at our feet, which instantly terrifies all the rathounds and I use a hypo to keep myself from bleeding to death.

I then proceed to misclick and waste the rest of my turn maneuvering around the rathound. Bah.

I also foolishly, hadn't restocked my belt with more nets, so I take this turn to do so. The fear only lasts one turn, at which point the rathounds get a debuff called Aphobic, which makes them immune to all fear effects for the next three turns. Most debuffs have a result like this, I guess to keep you from cheesing enemies by spamming the same disabling attacks over and over again.

A third rathound joins the fun.

I kill one of the rathounds, throw a net over the alpha and start hitting it.

Unfortunately the reach of an alpha is a little longer than I anticipated so I was still in its attack range when I ended my turn. So I'm now doubly bleeding.

Some consecutive criticals manage to put down the rest of the threats.

And my healing hypos cooled down fast enough that I didn't end up bleeding to death. How many times has a similar scenario gone badly for me in this game? It can happen a lot.

To the north of us is the entrance to Junkyard, we will take the west passage for a little bit though.

This place is a bit dangerous for us, but there's some rubble nearby we want to check out.

In it is another trilobite fossil!

Up ahead is a path northwards, I hubrously head up there.

This leads us to small location called the siphoner pools. I was planning on sneaking around here to pick another easy oddity, but it turns out I'm not stealthy enough yet, so I make a hasty retreat.

Back in the previous area, there's another passage east which also takes us to the entrance of Junkyard.

Welcome to Junkyard, population, a whole bunch.

Music - Junkyard

We can have a chat with one of the fishermen out the front to gain some of his home spun wisdom no doubt.

"What is this place?"

"Ya haven't been here before, eh? The place is called Junkyard. It ain't your typical station or nothin' like that.
Like South Gate or Rail Crossin'. Nothin' like that."

Nor are you to confuse it with Junk Town, which has a sheriff.

"We ain't got no laws, we ain't got no militia, so tread carefully and try not to step on any toes, especially those
of Black Eels or Scrappers. They are the two biggest gangs, and between them they control most of the Junkyard. Ya mess with them, ya end up in one of them scrap compactors. Yup."

We're going to want to immerse ourselves in the gang intrigues of Junkyard, and eventually pick a side to shake things up.

"Thanks for the tip. Got any more advice?"

He shrugs. "Let people fish in peace."

"What are you fishing for?"

"Why, eels, of course. They are de-licious and if I catch more than I need, I can always sell the rest to Kareem's
Bar. They got eel sandwiches there, and they make 'em pretty good."

"So leave me to my fishin'."

"What happened to your fingers?"

"Ran out of fishin' bait."

You stare at each other in silence. He is the first to break it.

"Nah. Scavengin' accident. I was at one of them... eh... Biocorp facilities when a security bot shot me. Blew off these two fingers of mine, but nothin' else."

I suspect we will be exploring this facility at some point, although I doubt from this description we'll know which one it was, unless we find some spare fingers in it I guess.

"Can't say I envy you. Where did that happen? Was it somewhere close?"

"Nah, that happened somewhere near Core City. Long time ago. Long story."

"Look, can I fish now?"

"You mentioned Kareem's bar. What can you tell me about it?"

"It's a bar and the owner's name's Kareem. Yup."

Informative...

"Where can I find it?"

"Eh..." He points his hand toward the entrance to Junkyard.

"Once you get past the gate go west. The bar is right behind Johan's scrap pile."

"Johan's scrap pile?"

"Ya ask a lot of questions. Ya will see for yerself, sister."

"I'll be going now."

Let's poke about the place for a bit.

Not much in the doors near the entrance that we can steal, too many eyes about.

We can grab a handful of Charons in the small shack. Incidentally, this tiny shack has a cloth curtain instead of a door. You can peek through these to see what's on the other side without needing to open the curtain.

We head into Junkyard proper. True to its name, it's full of junk.

Up to the west is Kareem's bar. We can see one of the patrons scarfing down something called a Junkyard Surprise.

Something else fun is that if you stand next to a barrel you gain a warmed up buff, which improves your cold resistance.

If you let the buff stack a few times, it gives immunity to chill and freezing debuffs, and you move and heal faster. Not terribly useful but it's a nice touch.

Anyway let's have a chat with Kareem.

"What can I get you, lady?"

"Merchants here only accept stygian coins? How do I get some of those?"

"Black Eels at the docks are willing to exchange some currencies. At terrible rates, that is."

I never bother exchanging currency, because of the terrible rates, despite the general crapness of SGS fun bucks, they're handy if you need to buy something in SGS.

"Got any real food?"

"Doesn't get any more real than this."

"What exactly goes into this 'Junkyard surprise'?"

"It's a surprise."

"Is it a nice surprise?"

"Could be."

It's never explained in game what a Junkyard surprise will do unlike other food effects. What is does is add 1-2 points to a random primary stat and then subtracts 1-2 points from another random primary stat. The effect lasts for 20mins.

That could potentially be useful, but like other foodstuffs, it's the kind of min-maxing bullshit that I simply don't have the attention span for.

"Can you tell me a bit about Junkyard?"

"Maybe."

Kareem wants to bribed before he will give up any information, we don't want to waste what little charons we have on rumors though. I've never taken him up on this personally.

"Maybe not."

He shrugs. "Anything else I can help you with?"

"Suddenly I'm not hungry anymore."

Kareem, unsurprisingly is Junkyards food vendor. We sell him the excess food we are carrying around to give us a nice charon cash injection.

Just north of the bar are these two shacks. The west-most one is locked, but nobody will care if we try to break into it.

In the other shoddily build dwelling is a guy called Grover. We will talk to him the next time we come back to Junkyard, what we really came in here for is on his shelves. Which he doesn't mind us robbing.

A Protectorate propaganda oddity!

Breaking into the other shack.

We discover another shelf that contains another protectorate propaganda oddity.

We will make our way into ye olde weapons shoppe.

"Where are the Docks?"

"To the east, sis, ya can't miss it."

Most of the merchants in Junkyard aren't particularly chatty, so we'll get right to the trading.

"Show me what you got."

Len will be a great source of Charons for us in the early game. We will sell off our excess weapons, ammo, and armor.

We also trade up our combat gloves for some higher quality ones that are also spiked for extra mechanical damage.

We sift through the dumpster outside of the store.

I love this dumpster. We will be using it to stash all of our excess gear so we can easily sell when trade requests reset. This is a great way to make a lot of extra cash in this game.

We got talk to Johan.

"Show me what you have."

Johan mostly sells various mechanical crafting components. He's a good source of metal plates.

We go talk to Kendrick.

"What's there to hunt in the nearby caves?"

"Rathounds and hoppers mostly."

I don't know where he gets that idea, there aren't very many rathounds in the caves near Junkyard.

"Them beetles too, but they taste terrible."

"I was really hungry once and had to eat a bit of it. The only part ya can actually eat is the brain. First when ya
take a bite, it ain't so bad, but then..."

"As soon as ya catch one of 'em thin blue veins or they burst and spill out... ugh, so bitter. I could taste it in my mouth fer weeks!"

You can get a meal called psi beetle soup, so he probably just doesn't know how to prepare them properly.

"Show me what you got, old timer."

He's a hunting supplies trader, a good source of nets and poisoned throwing daggers for us.

I decide to pick up the blueprints for throwing knives, so we can eventually make our own poisoned variants.

And I grab a fresh batch of tailoring kits to tie us over until we can make our own.

We then go, have a chat to the final trader in this area Kimi.

"What kinds of mushrooms and plants do you sell here?"

"Mindshrooms, lake shrooms, lake poppies. That sort of thing."

"What about these things, the prickly ones?"

"Cacti? Those are not for sale. I mean, they're for someone else. Should come for them soon, I think."

"Show me what you have."

We pick up the blueprint to allow us to refine our plants and mushrooms. We could have done this back at SGS, but there you go.

We head up west towards the HQ of the Scrappers gang.

But first, I finally remember that I have ample electronics skill to make a taser and so do. Tasers are great in this game. As long as the damage isn't resisted, the taser will provide us with an instant stun attack.

It only lasts for one turn, but for us this means we sneak up on an enemy, zap him, and use our opportunistic attacks to kill him. It's works incredibly well, we will strap it to our belt and never let go. The only downside is that it needs to be routinely charged, so we will need to start keeping a more ample supply of batteries.

This place is called Depot B, where the scrappers have their main operations.

There's not much to take here without pissing off the scrappers, but I did find some free scrap metal.

Up in the back here we have the scrapper main trader, Gort.

"What do you do with all the junk?"

"We sell it, of course."

"Some I sell to ladies like yerself, but most of it get shipped to the Foundry, Core City... some goes to the
Protectorate.. and so on."

This is the main source of income in Junkyard, rifling through all of the old trash left here by the old biocorps, and selling it to ladies like us.

"That's how we make our livin'."

"Show me what you got, junk keeper."

Gort's a goods source of explosives and occasionally has some pretty decent quality crafting items.

I pick up some more lockpicks, since I'm starting to run low.

Heading back the main marketplace, we then make our way east towards the docks.

And we will continue our limited tour of Junkyard next time. Happy New Year everyone!

Zeniel fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Jan 7, 2023

# ? Jan 2, 2023 21:25

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# ? May 3, 2024 19:18

Szarrukin: Sep 29, 2021

Which build is the funniest and least tedious to play? Is it possible to play pure psi character?

# ? Jan 3, 2023 02:33

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Szarrukin posted:

Which build is the funniest and least tedious to play? Is it possible to play pure psi character?

Funniest and least tedious is a bit subjective, but in my opinion, if you're looking to at least reduce tedium, avoid any serious tank builds. Heavy armor, max health, and Sledgehammer/Spear are perfectly viable builds, but combat will last a lot longer and you'll spend a lot of time being stunned, staggered, slowed and immobilized. There's a Youtuber called Bringitdon who clearly likes playing big tanky guys in his RPG playthroughs and he successfully blind played his way through this game with exactly that. But man, is it a slog of a build to watch. He also adamantly refused to dip into psi, which fair enough, but some temporal manipulation would have made him a bit more effective. Not throwing shade on the guy or anything, just not my idea of a fun playthrough of this game.

You can also alter the combat speed if you want to speed things up a little. This game is usually pretty good about combat speed anyway, as most fights are deadly enough that the outcome will be decided in a few short turns. BUT there is a type of enemy that will show up in a few places in the DLC that slows combat to a horrible crawl. When in doubt, liberally apply explosives.

For a funny build, something like a hunter/trapper with thought control might be a good way to go. You sneak about, use either a hunting knife or a crossbow (both are fantastic weapons in the right hands), and lure people into a myriad of bear traps, mines and gas traps. Thought control will let you pit guys against one another and can just create some good chaos. If that sounds tedious, I can assure you, it's surprisingly fun and effective.

I've never tried it, but there's also a human warcrime build, a lot of people enjoy. This involves focusing heavily on chemical weapons and gas traps, poisons etc. You throw a gas grenade or set off a mine, lock a door and wait for the gas to propagate a room and slowly kill everyone. Sounds like it'd take a bit of investment and or set up to me. I'm not really sure how to use gas weapons very well myself.

Another hilarious build is the shiv build, where you just focus exclusively on rusty metal spikes wrapped in dirty rags. What is no doubt the crappiest damage weapon in the game can become a rapid fire crit fest, you can clear whole maps of some of the largest groups of enemies in a few short turns if you build this right. But this is a bit of an advanced build even for me.

If you're looking for quick and effective builds, you can't go wrong with an assault rifle build. They take a bit of investment in guns to begin with to get over the accuracy penalties, but they can drop a whole room in seconds. Nothing can survive an entire round of fully automatic assault rifle firing the right type of ammo, and I mean nothing. The main drawback is you'll need to lug around all of that extra ammunition but that's manageable. You could also try an SMG build instead, as it gives you a lot synergies with explosives and the like.

As for a pure psi builds they're absolutely possible. They used to be incredibly overpowered before they updated them. The main drawback with a pure psi build is basically the same one we have. Most psi powers are either completely ineffective or highly resisted by automaton enemies. Psychokinetics has a few powers that work well on robots, but yeah they will be your main drawback. That and early on, large fights will tax your psi bar to its limits, so you need to focus on making stuff that reduces the cost of your abilities and keep up your psi booster/inhalent supplies, and this can make the early game quite costly money and experience wise. Other than that you probably don't want to stretch yourself too thin and just focus on one or two of the disciplines at first. You can always pick and mix depending on the situation if you can handle the innervation costs.

Zeniel fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Dec 31, 2023

# ? Jan 3, 2023 08:41

The Lone Badger: Sep 24, 2007

Zeniel posted:

If you're looking for quick and effective builds, you can't go wrong with an assault rifle build. They take a bit of investment in guns to begin with to get over the accuracy penalties, but they can drop a whole room in seconds. Nothing can survive a full round of fully automatic fire, with the right ammo and assault rifle and I mean nothing. The main drawback is you'll need to lug around a lot of ammo but that's manageable.

My build was Assault Rifle / Sniper Rifle. You have two weapon slots that you can switch between with no AP cost, so you can interleave the two weapon types freely. The main reason to do this is that you'll have two separate sets of Active abilities on separate cooldowns.
So for example I start in stealth mode and use Snipe to deal massive damage to a single enemy, killing them. Shooting Spree means I get refunded my AP if I killed my target, so I then use Aimed Shot to get a critical hit on a second enemy, killing them. Once again my AP are refunded. I switch to my assault rifle and fire full auto into another enemy, killing them. My perks mean that once per turn I get to fire a second burst at no extra cost so I fire full auto into a fourth enemy, killing them. Then I use the last of my AP to shoot someone normally, wounding them.

# ? Jan 3, 2023 08:54

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

Just to be clear, each oddity can only be studied once before it's consumed, but you can farm more oddities of the same type and study them up to the whatever is that type's limit? That's what makes sense, but the actual in-game text seems to imply that you can study the same oddity over and over.

Also, can you lure enemies towards NPCs? So far, it seems like the levels were structured to make that impossible.

# ? Jan 3, 2023 19:22

By popular demand: Jul 17, 2007; IT *BZZT* WASP ME--
IT WASP ME ALL *BZZT* ALONG!

Every oddity you pick up has a set number of instances you get XP from:
Find a mink coat, get XP, now the amount of mink coats you can benefit from has decreased by one. Importantly you never actually get an inventory item so each instance is used once.

Also kiting enemies can definitely work in some places. There should be one in a mission soon ish.

# ? Jan 3, 2023 19:34

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Yeah basically you find a mink coat it'll be like mink coat 0/5. Pick it up, it disappears, you gain 1 xp. Next mink coat you find will be mink coat 1/5, next one after that will be mink coat 2/5, etc etc. So overall, if you find 5 mink coats you'll get 5 xp. Some oddities give you more xp but you tend to be able to study them less. Pick up a 6th mink coat, the game will say you failed to learn anything knew from studying the oddity.

As for kiting, yeah it should work where its possible. You rarely tend to fight areas where there's friendlies about though, unless you count traps, traps are your best friends.

Zeniel fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Jan 3, 2023

# ? Jan 3, 2023 20:12

Szarrukin: Sep 29, 2021

If anyone's interested, both Underrail and expansion are currently 50% off on Steam

# ? Jan 3, 2023 20:17

Enrico la Spaniard: Dec 15, 2021

I did a pure psi run recently and it was great fun shooting laser beams from my eyes like Cyclops and/or forcing enemies to kill each other to help with crowd control. Gives you access to a lot of background lore, as well. As OP says, however, yeah, it struggles a bit against robot enemies - you just need to know which abilities to innervate at a given time, though, and be willing to use unorthodox strategies to eke out a win. The only time I really struggled was during the DLC, which tosses a good few inventive combats your way.

Enrico la Spaniard fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Jan 3, 2023

# ? Jan 3, 2023 21:54

Koorisch: Mar 29, 2009

That explosives build with the special belt is hilarious, I saw someone use that with great effect against some pretty tanky enemies.

Just a shame I probably will never get it since it only shows up on Dominating, i'm not nearly skilled enough to try that out.

# ? Jan 3, 2023 22:25

Szarrukin: Sep 29, 2021

Imagine my surprise when I realized there is no Underrail thread on SA.

# ? Jan 3, 2023 22:27

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Szarrukin posted:

Imagine my surprise when I realized there is no Underrail thread on SA.

Partly why I really wanted to let's play this game. Literally no one of the forums talks about this game and there's no thread for it or anything and it's really good.

# ? Jan 3, 2023 22:32

Szarrukin: Sep 29, 2021

I think the only place other than reddit that actually talks about Underrail is RPGCodex, and I'm not touching that cesspool with 10 foot pole.

# ? Jan 3, 2023 23:05

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

I had a lot of people online pester me in a "hey it's a Serbian game and you're Serbian, tell us more about it" way which kinda put me off of playing it despite the game itself absolutely sounding like something that'd be right up my alley, and probably including more relatable references than the very Americana fallout stuff. The hype stopped pretty quickly and then nobody ever brought it up again and I forgot about it. (Had something similar happen with Disco Elysium and "hey you're from Eastern Europe right?" and insufferable �i�ek memes, but I eventually gave that game a chance and didn't regret it).

I thiiiink I might have this game gifted to me by someone a million years ago, so I'll see if I can play along a bit if I find the time.

# ? Jan 3, 2023 23:14

Anticheese: Feb 13, 2008; $60,000,000 sexbot

This game was also brought up during the Atom RPG LP as a contrast to that game, both being homages to Fallout. There really is just no comparison in terms of quality.

# ? Jan 4, 2023 00:10

Szarrukin: Sep 29, 2021

Anticheese posted:

This game was also brought up during the Atom RPG LP as a contrast to that game, both being homages to Fallout. There really is just no comparison in terms of quality.

Yes, from all "Fallout spiritual successors" - Encased, Atom, Underrail - it's definitely the best one (also the only one not LP'ed by TheGreatEvilKing)

# ? Jan 4, 2023 00:24

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Szarrukin posted:

I think the only place other than reddit that actually talks about Underrail is RPGCodex, and I'm not touching that cesspool with 10 foot pole.

I'd heard how bad that place was but I hadn't ever looked there until recently when I was looking for some things related to Underrail and good god what an awful online community.

# ? Jan 4, 2023 08:22

MonsieurChoc: Oct 12, 2013; Every species can smell its own extinction.

I'm definitely gonna play this at some point.

You say explosives is viable, huh?

# ? Jan 4, 2023 17:07

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

MonsieurChoc posted:

I'm definitely gonna play this at some point.

You say explosives is viable, huh?

Viable? Bloody optimal is what explosives are.

# ? Jan 4, 2023 17:09

MonsieurChoc: Oct 12, 2013; Every species can smell its own extinction.

Zeniel posted:

Viable? Bloody optimal is what explosives are.

There's a cool older lady portrait, help me build Granny Boom-Boom.

# ? Jan 4, 2023 17:11

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

MonsieurChoc posted:

There's a cool older lady portrait, help me build Granny Boom-Boom.

Well I'm not entirely confident, but I think you want to focus on your dexterity as you main stat, and heavily focus on throwing and traps. Chemistry is obviously a given and a little bit of the other tech as needed, Electronics eventually for EMP/Plasma explosives. Temporal Manipulation you definitely want to help you ease your cool downs too. You will probably want a different weapon focus too when you're low of explosives, maybe a crossbow, or SMG (if you want a feat that synergises with flashbangs) although you might get a way with just throwing knives if you're feeling dangerous ...

Then I'd recommend looking through the feats in this https://underrail.info/build/, and just picking the ones that make you better with grenades, things like quick pockets, grenadier, quick tinkering, trap expert, three pointer and probably future orientation, trigger happy and interloper if you want to be sneaky wouldn't go amiss either. If you're not bothered with stealth I reckon it'd be good to try and pick up a lot of heavy/flame resistant armor too. That way you don't even need to be all that accurate, just walk up to guys and drops bombs at your feet. If they're incendiary grenades they'll just set the whole room ablaze while you're still mostly unburnt.

Probably go with a utility belt to maximise gadgets, either that or a tinkerer belt for better traps skill.

Quick tinkering will let you drop traps in the middle of combat for some fun shenanigans, and if you make it to energy traps/grenades, there'll be little that will stand up to you, fair fight or not.

Those are my initial thoughts on how Granny Boom-Boom might go. I'd say more, but there's plenty of game left for me to spoil at this point.

Zeniel fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Dec 31, 2023

# ? Jan 4, 2023 17:41

MonsieurChoc: Oct 12, 2013; Every species can smell its own extinction.

Zeniel posted:

Well I'm not entirely confident, but I think you want to focus on your dexterity as you main stat, and heavily focus on throwing and traps. Chemistry is obviously a given and a little bit of the other tech as needed, Electronics eventually for EMP/Plasma explosives. Temporal Manipulation you definitely want to help you ease your cool downs too. You will probably want a different weapon focus too when you're low of explosives, maybe a crossbow, or SMG (if you want a feat that synergises with flashbangs) although you might get a way with just throwing knives if you're feeling dangerous ...

Then I'd recommend looking through the feats in this https://underrail.info/build/, and just picking the ones that make you better with grenades, things like quick pockets, grenadier, quick tinkering, trap expert, three pointer and probably future orientation, trigger happy and interloper if you want to be sneaky wouldn't go amiss either. If you're not bothered with stealth I reckon it'd be good to try and pick up a lot of heavy/flame resistant armor too. That way you don't even need to be all that accurate, just walk up to guys and drops bombs at your feet. If they're incendiary grenades they'll just set the whole room on ablaze while you're still mostly unburnt.

Probably go with a utility belt to maximise gadgets, either that or a tinkerer belt for better traps skill.

Quick tinkering will let you drop traps in the middle of combat for some fun shenanigans, and if you make it to energy traps/grenades, there'll be little that will stand up to you, fair fight or not.

Those are my initial thoughts on how Granny Boom-Boom might go. I'd say more, but there's plenty of game left for me to spoil at this point.

Oh my! Thanks a lot

Edit: Something like this for level 1? https://underrail.info/build/?AQMKBQUFBgYADwAAAAAAAAAADwAADwAAAAAAAAAAAC_Cg9-_

MonsieurChoc fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jan 4, 2023

# ? Jan 4, 2023 17:47

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

I'd say drop you will down to 3, you're not going to need it and boost your strength up and maybe up your intelligence to 7, the extra boost to your tech will come in handy.

# ? Jan 4, 2023 18:10

TheGreatEvilKing: Mar 28, 2016

Szarrukin posted:

Yes, from all "Fallout spiritual successors" - Encased, Atom, Underrail - it's definitely the best one (also the only one not LP'ed by TheGreatEvilKing)

In my defense this game ate me alive as I'm really, really bad at building characters for it.

# ? Jan 4, 2023 20:44

Szarrukin: Sep 29, 2021

Tried to make pure psi build, but had to restart somewhere after GMS because it was poo poo. I would kill for mod with "respec" button, I hate wasting several hours just to find out I did everything wrong.

For a lack of Underrail thread this is my new build for pure psi (level 1 level 10 level 20 level 30 ), good or trash?

# ? Jan 4, 2023 22:29

Enrico la Spaniard: Dec 15, 2021

Szarrukin posted:

Tried to make pure psi build, but had to restart somewhere after GMS because it was poo poo. I would kill for mod with "respec" button, I hate wasting several hours just to find out I did everything wrong.

For a lack of Underrail thread this is my new build for pure psi (level 1 level 10 level 20 level 30 ), good or trash?

First off, what difficulty? I only roll on normal for this game cause I don't like having my balls in a vise.

Secondly, I recommend investing more in the other psi schools, particularly thought control. Temporal Manipulation is what I got the least use out of, but even that became handy during particularly tricky DLC fights. I know that the meta promotes two schools at most, but I found it best to have options - and all it means is that you'll have to huff on the psi inhalers a bit more to innervate the right powers for the right situation. Hell, sometimes it's even worth dealing with the increased costs so you can respond quickly, depending on the situation.

Throwing is good, but I didn't use it at all. Same for pickpocketing, which is only really useful to grab Oddities off people, imo. You can live without that. With those points freed up, I was able to pour a lot into the psi schools. Stealth, Hacking and Lockpicking are good investments, keep those. You can actually stop putting points into Persuasion at a fairly low level (like 60ish, I think) and be able to coast by relatively well.

# ? Jan 4, 2023 22:56

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Szarrukin posted:

Tried to make pure psi build, but had to restart somewhere after GMS because it was poo poo. I would kill for mod with "respec" button, I hate wasting several hours just to find out I did everything wrong.

For a lack of Underrail thread this is my new build for pure psi (level 1 level 10 level 20 level 30 ), good or trash?

A couple of things worth pointing out, the maximum effective hacking you will ever need is about 135 IIRC. You can have this lower with some items, lockpicking also only needs to be at 130 effective before you get no further use for it.

Pack rathound is a good choice for such low str. I'd recommend swapping out snooping for sprint instead, sprint can make all the difference between life and death, especially given you're a glass cannon, since you con is so low and you're a psi caster.

You're also going to want some mechanics and tailoring skill, and probably electronics earlier on to make yourself some psi gear. You'll want a psi beetle carapace tactical vest, and a headband of some description. Some other things we aren't ready to talk about yet too. You probably don't need to overshoot your tech skills beyond effective 100 though. Chemistry would also be handy to make your own grenades. You're insanely high intelligence will make is far easier to hit the stat requirements for crafting much earlier too.

But yeah it seems perfectly viable, probably would play on classic xp just to be on the safe side.

# ? Jan 4, 2023 23:27

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Chapter 6 - The package

Where we last left off we were giving Junkyard a brief tour and we just arrived at the docks.

The docks are the home grounds of the Black Eels, who hold a tenuous position in Junkyard, but they have a firm grip on the waters and therefore the sea trade around it.

Up ahead is Dockmaster Silas the main guy of the Black Eels in Junkyard, but we care more about the door next to us.

Here is Colton, the currency exchange merchant and primary trader of the Black Eels.

"Show me what you have."

Colton is also a good source of decent quality crafting items in Junkyard. When you're ready to craft up a storm, heading over to junkyard and shopping around the gang merchants is a good way to get some decent quality gear made.

Nearby is Captain Broderick, we can pay for a trip back to SGS with him if we want to. But in the interest of saving money, we'll just hike it all the way back instead.

Home sweet home.

Music - Homestation

We go visit Big Bret to turn in our tasks.

"I've got your hoppers."

"Excellent work! Here's your payment. So would you like to name them?"

"Aren't we just going to eat them eventually?"

"Eventually, yes. But until then I need to keep track of them, and it's easier if they're given names."

"Alright then."

"So what's it gonna be?"

"Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner."

Bret chuckles heartily. "So be it!"

We could also have named them, after Donald Ducks nephews, the Three Musketeers, or Epicurus, Schopenhauer, and Nietzche. They actually become named entities in the cages behind Bret too.

"Oh, and what about Newton?"

"He ran into psi beetles and was forced to hide in an abandoned warehouse just west of the Mushroom Cove. He cut his leg a bit, but he'll survive; in fact, Pasquale should be patching him up right now."

"I told him to be careful, not to wander off too far. Well, glad he's all right, and thank you for helping him. That is all as far as I'm concemed. You can go back to Tanner."

We can go visit Newton on the medical floor. We will do this next time. Because I forgot to.

We head back up to Tanner to get ourselves some more tasks to do.

"I'm done with Bret's quest. Now what?"

"Excellent, I have another task for you. Gorsky has led an expedition into the nearby GMS compound and he requested that you specifically join them there. Go to station platform exit and talk to Essie. She can instruct you on how to reach GMS compound."

Could this be the infamous Expedition DLC?

No.

No it isn't.

"After you've completed this task come and see me."

At this point I realised that I never asked Tanner his opinion on the United Stations. So I quickly go ask him.

"Tell me about United Stations"

"United Stations organization is a diplomatic off-shoot of the Protectorate. It seeks to unify the stations through 'peaceful' means where possible through politics and economy."

"Make no mistake, though, United Stations are under Protectorate control and are effectively one organization. However, the United Station administration is not as
monolithic as that of the Protectorate."

"This will - I predict - at some point, when a certain strong figure is no longer in place, bring about interesting events."

Hmm sounds familiar.

"I'll see you later."

We head to the canteen to check if Arlene's got some more cash to trade food for.

And she has!

We head back down to our quarters to drop off the excess stuff from our most recent escapades.

I head down to Quinton to pick up blueprints for incendiary grenades. Can never have too many grenades. Well until they eat into our carrying capacity too greatly I suppose.

Molotov cocktails are nice and easy to make just glass bottles, fuel, and, dirty rags. They set fire to their blast area, and they have a chance to set anything caught in their blast radius ablaze. This can both cause damage over time and the ablaze creature will often panic. They will then walk through the newly created fire field doing more damage to themselves in the process.

We can make better versions of these by replacing the fuel with a magnesium compound, to make a magnesium bomb. They make even more aggressive flames.

We go down to medical to check in on Newton.

"I just came over to check out how you were doing. And be careful next time you go chasing hoppers. Bye."

"I'm fine at the moment. The leg kinda still hurts, but, like, it's getting better. As far as hunting those stupid hoppers, that's not gonna happen any time soon. See you around, Henrietta."

Newton's extremely lucky to be alive, we can only hope he'll prove himself more of an asset to SGS in other ways.

Before we head over to hang with our good buddy Gorsky, we'll pick up a quest from Jack.

"What happened with that business opportunity?"

"It's a business secret."

"If you're interested in doing some work, though, that's something I can arrange."

"What kind of work?"

"Package delivery. I'll pay you in SGS credits. Hundred pieces."

"You interested?"

"Yeah. Tell me the details."

He beckons you closer. "You know where the GMS warehouse block is?"

"Yes."

We don't, obviously. But he won't give us the quest unless we convince him we do.

"First go to the barracks at the station platform here in SGS. This key will open one of the footlockers and the package will be inside." He hands you the key.

"Take the package to the warehouse block, to the building just south of the GMS compound. A man will be waiting for the package there and you'll get your money."

"Alright."

"We will not speak of this again until the job is done."

At this point its important to make any last minute purchases from Jack as he will leave SGS from this point forward.

We just sell him some stuff we're carrying.

We make our way up to Essie to ask for directions.

"Yes, I was hoping you could tell me how to get somewhere."

"Sure. Where are you headed?"

"I need to get to GMS compound."

"That one's easy. Just exit the station to the north and head straight until the first crossroad. Then turn left and go straight until you come upon an auxiliary road. Keep going straight, following the road, and it will lead you into an abandoned warehouse block. GMS compound is in its northwest corner."

While the rubble will make this place easier to find, there can be some dangerous wrong turns we can stumble down at this point if we wander about too freely.

"Thanks."

"Take care."

Following Jack's instructions, we enter the guards sleeping quarters.

And there's the package we need to transport.

We make our way up north.

There's occasionally some goodies in these nearby barrels.

This time we only find the Protectorate Propaganda oddity. Not complaining.

Just past the barrels is a bandit blockade. These guys only appear if you agree to take the package for Jack.

"What package?"

"Don't try my patience, punk. Give me the bloody package and walk away! Otherwise..."

"Why don't you try and take it, you dumb oaf?"

We could play nice, but I'm pretty sure this is the only outcome to this encounter, it we gave him the package it would turn out to be empty, interestingly enough.

He frowns. "Oaf!? Oh, I'll be taking that package and your life, punk!"

Their leader opens with a piss poor shot.

Their sledge guy hits us real bad though.

And the last guy shoots us for a good chunk of damage.

I respond with a poorly aimed grenade.

And blow myself up. Oops.

It marks my first official death. I won't be keeping tabs on these because I occasionally load before I'm obviously about to die. Death is all too frequent in this game. All combat is brutally swift, if you don't win in a few short turns, its usually because your dead.

Unsurprisingly, this game doesn't really have an ironman community. I think I saw one person make an ironman run attempt and they clearly gave up halfway through and just started playing normally. It should be possible in principle, but not an easy feat.

Let's try this again.

This time, only the smg guy beats my initiative check and proceeds to bunch up with the other guys.

This time, the grenade does its job nicely.

We take the sledgehammer guys sledgehammer, and equip it to our offhand. We're not specced for them, but we're also not the worst with them either. We've got good strength and a decent melee skill. The extra 23.00 weight will suck, but we're going to need to hang onto this for the time being.

We harvest the rest of the useful junk off of the remaining bodies.

Our tailoring is good enough that we can finally disassemble any armor and boots we find into fabric scraps. We will need to do this, both to keep our weight down and to make us some repair kits and throwing nets. Most leather goods aren't really worth selling anyway.

Anyway, let's take a little detour from our main destination. We head down the nearby steps to poke about the service tunnels.

Music - Tensecaves

There's a few lurkers, lurking about down here.

They aren't too fond of grenades. Which are still effective enough to insta kill them. See how good even mk I grenades are?

South of our position we find a suspicious door with an intercom attached to it.

Ring it.

Nothing happens.

There's something good past this door, but we'll need to know how to get through it first.

Enough time has passed that any looky loos have returned to their positions, and we can loot the bodies. This one has a crowbar on them.

Crowbars are handy for high strength individuals, as you can use them to effortlessly bust open ventilation ducts. They are a fairly mediocre but uniquely blunt one-handed, melee weapon that's also indestructible. They are otherwise dead inventory weight, as I don't think anyone will buy them.

If we had a high perception, we could have found a hidden door way along the eastern wall, this would have had another oddity in it.

Around the corner is another lurker. Let's try out our brand new taser.

It works great! Now that he's stunned we get a full round of opportunistic attacks.

No solo encounter is going to survive a sneak, zap, punch combo for a while coming.

Down here we can see the roller doors that lead back to the security room that monitors these tunnels. In an alternate playthrough we'd be investigating why one of these cameras was smashed.

Last guy hanging around this area is up ahead.

He's nothing special.

We make our way further east.

This area is just an unwelcoming.

This stalker is a good early game target to find.

Zap! Bamp! Kapow!

He has a poisoned throwing knife! We'll be taking that!

He always has a really decent overcoat on his person. It has a ballistic panel installed in it, so it will boost mechanical damage thresholds by 200% which is insane protection against bullets. Unfortunately for us, it has antithermic properties, this means the overcoat is made of aluminised cloth. This gives you high heat protection and immunity to burning, but really tanks your stealth skill. So, sadly, for our stealthy rear end, it's just trade fodder.

My taser is also low on charge, so we need to use a battery on it. If you want a taser with a higher energy capacity, you need to make one with a higher quality energy core.

This nearby gate can be picked.

Which leads to a gentleman who is holding our first assault rifle.

He never gets a chance to use it.

His leather overcoat is a nice replacement for us. Overcoats are basically just any armor that has a cloth secondary component. You can make it out of black cloth, like this one, which boosts stealth; aluminised cloth, which we've already talked about; or kevlar cloth, which boosts an armors mechanical damage threshold.

Assault rifles are majestic weapons in this game. But not for us.

We also pick up an eye patch oddity which puts us over the level threshold! There's also some ampules in here which we need to extract things from plants, fungi and organs.

Our melee gets boosted as always.

And we tick up our tech stats to make them ever more useful.

Anyway sneaking around some more, we head towards a hidden foe.

He's difficult to spot. Thankfully he doesn't spot us either.

We aren't the best spotter, thanks to our awful perception, we actually need to bump into him to detect him we're that unperceptive.

From here he's just a walking corpse.

His boots make nice scrap.

Close to him is another locked away room.

In a nearby barrel is some graphite. I wasn't sure what this was for, but it's used to make armor piercing rounds, not very useful to us.

The room is riddled with vermin.

My throwing skill could be better...

But my taser works on big rathounds too, so this area is pretty trivial.

In the back is an Old Train Schedule oddity.

Also a guaranteed riot overcoat. These tend to be similar to tactical vests but they tend to give you a mix of extra melee and ranged protection, albeit less than a tactical vest and you can also attach a shield to them. Good if you're a sword and board sorta person.

We also find one tungsten carbide 8.6mm armor piercing round. Armor piercing rounds are in fairly short supply and you chew through them when you need them. For us its just easy money.

We head down south to poke around a bit more.

Nothing too exciting around here.

We find some graffiti that says Free Drones. That belongs to a faction we haven't met yet.

East and South, this hallway has another lurker waiting for us.

Right there.

Annoyingly I bump into him before combat starts and he wins the initiative check and drat near kills me with his knife play.

Unlucky for him, all I need is one round.

Past him there's some pipeworks.

And in this small room is the last lurker.

He's also a knife guy. He isn't so lucky.

Nearby we run into our first toxic gas hazard. There could be something interesting to find in the barrels in that cloud, but without some biological damage protection, that gas would kill us very quickly. Usually a gas mask would do the trick, but you can get away with wearing some protective boots too. Because gas respects a nice pair of boots.

That's enough messing about in the tunnels for now, we return to lower underrail.

North of the stairs there's more rathounds about the place.

I whip some throwing daggers at a nearby explosive barrel.

Westwards is even more rathounds. But they are but chaff before our scythe.

At this point we are starting to get a little over encumbered. Even light encumbrance is pretty hindering in this game.

So we head back home and drop off more junk.

I also spend most of my remaining money on some throwing nets, blueprints for combat gloves, and blueprints for throwing nets.

Making our way back to where we were, I proceed a little bit more north.

This place is just some side exploration.

Rathounds galore!

Rathounds kaboom!

And we FINALLY find our first rathound oddity the Fancy Rathound Ear. It couldn't hide from us forever.

At this stage, our chemistry is good enough that I opt to make some mk II hand grenades.

These will handle drat near anything we go up against at this point.

We see there's been a bit of an slaughter in this area, besides our own personal contributions that is. I think there's some destroyed gun turrets amidst the carnage.

In the old security check point, we find a Strange Comm Device oddity. There's also some sponge filters back here too, we can use these to help make psi inhalants.

There's also a rubber sole, you need two of these to make a pair of boots. There's also a ballistic panel as well, used in the making of various armors.

We also find our first energy weapon, a shock steel machete. Pretty much any melee weapon can have an electrical component and power source attached to it to make it discharge electricity into enemies. In the future, we will be doing this to a pair of gloves for all the goodness which that entails.

There is also a poisoned bear trap, which we leave behind, as we won't ever have the traps skill to make use of it.

We then blindly walk straight into a land mine. The area east of here is pretty heavily mined. Two mines will assuredly kill us. Just as well, we can't proceed further this way anyway.

So we head west instead.

This screen is a crossroads. There isn't much else interesting about it.

We do find a mold needed to craft a dagger. Which we ignore.

North of the crossroads is more impassible rubble.

We keep wandering west.

And walk into a bear trap. These will keep us in place for a 15 seconds and cause us to bleed too. If there were enemies about, usually one would come and investigate too.

There is also a mine in this area too, but we thankfully avoided stepping on it.

Here we find a thought control modulator, there are modulators for each of the different psi disciplines as well as a universal modulator. You can use these to make psi headbands, which you can wear on your head slot to give you a boost to a relevant psi skill. The higher quality the modulator, the better the skill boost. The universal ones obviously boost all of them but at a reduced strength.

We also find some Electromagnetic dischargers, we can use these to make EMP grenades or mines. We will only be making the grenades.

We also find a cardboard box. These are used to make the kind of explosives needed to remove rubble. Of course we don't have access to the blueprints, but we'll hang onto this for later.

The nearby old Omega facility has no power to the doors so we won't be able to go into this one. I honestly don't remember if we ever gain access to this place or not. It's a long ways off if we ever do in any event.

Anyway, we head south from that crossroads and we're back on the path to the GMS warehouse.

We take one last small detour south however and swing round to the west.

This location is a little rich for our blood. We see our first guard dog enemies. They're a lot like rathounds in a way, but a bit tougher. They have a tendency to pin us in place if they get it combat with us. Making it much harder to move out of harms way.

We also see this area has a new gang, the lunatics. This gang is comprised largely of powerful psionics. We will avoid fighting them all at present.

In a nearby checkpoint, there's some high density foam padding. This can be used to add extra melee protection to a piece of armor.

There's also some anticoagulant, this can be crafted, but its requisite organ is somewhat uncommon. We can use it to make health hypos eventually. Up until writing this I didn't realize you could also coat a weapon in it to extend bleeding effects. That is interesting.

There's another small building we can hack into on the other side of this area.

Inside are some flat beakers needed for various ingredient extracts. And a bonding agent which is used primarily in the construction of chemical ammo types or traps.

Moving ourselves north of here we have arrived outside the GMS warehouse.

Just need to deal with the worthless rathounds. Something new here about rathounds I haven't mentioned. Rathounds, if you let them, will howl and call for help. This only works if there's other rathounds in close enough proximity of course. Dogs can also do the same thing, and human enemies will too if you let them.

They are everywhere.

But no tougher.

We still find more old omega id cards.

There's a small door just below us that's unpickably locked, I'm not sure we'll ever find a key to open it.

There is a small storage room we can break into at least.

A bunch of steel spikes you can adorn metal armor in to improve melee damage, would be handy for us but metal armor is far too bulky. We can strap them to combat gloves if we want to though. There's also a short barrel for a shotgun, and the handle and mold for a dagger. Junk.

There was also another omega id card in there too.

This gate can be picked.

We find the case to make an EMP mine, I probably shouldn't have bothered picking this up.

Next to it is the place Jack wanted us to deliver the package too.

To deliver it to... Jack?

"What is the meaning of this?"

"I knew I was being watched, so I had to use someone as a decoy while I get the real package out of the station."

"But it is as I promised: A man was waiting to pay you for the delivery. I never said who the man would be. He hands you some credits."

Jack is.. someone special and we will want to help him as best we can. 100 SGS credits for this job is highway robbery, but whatever, we want to stay in Jack's good graces.

"Why did you wait for me if you expected me to die?"

"I'm a man of my word, Henrietta, I always honor the deal."

That... doesn't make any sense.

"What will you do now?"

"I'll move on to... some other place. The trains are out, but there are other ways to travel around, though, they are much slower, especially if you don't know all the shortcuts." He smiles.

We won't be seeing Jack for a little while yet, but we will track him down eventually. He will lead us to some... interesting places.

"Let me know if there's something you'd like to trade before I leave."

"Yeah, show me what you have."

We stock up on a few more lockpicks, may as well, as Jack won't be available any time soon.

And we finally arrive at the GMS compound, with Gorsky's lookout, guarding the front.

We will find out what lies in store for us next time.

Zeniel fucked around with this message at 09:51 on Jan 5, 2023

# ? Jan 5, 2023 03:07

By popular demand: Jul 17, 2007; IT *BZZT* WASP ME--
IT WASP ME ALL *BZZT* ALONG!

You got some broken image tags at the end of your post.
also that last area is a place you can kite enemies: just find a rathound and run away behind the soldier.

# ? Jan 5, 2023 08:53

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

By popular demand posted:

You got some broken image tags at the end of your post.

Good catch, thanks!

# ? Jan 5, 2023 09:53

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Chapter 7 - The Mystery Door

Music - Tensecaves

When we last left off, we had just arrived at the Omega GMS warehouse to see what Gorsky has in store for us.

"What is this place?"

"This is the GMS compound. Used to belong to our old friends from Omega. They abandoned it at some point. But not before sealing it shut. The bastards."

"We tried to break in a number of times, but it was no use. Now the earthquake has done the work for us."

"What does GMS stand for?"

"I have no idea. But I doubt it was vital for their operations, as it was one of the first buildings they abandoned when their manpower started dwindling."

"Who are the Omega?"

"They were a station we competed with for the control of the South Gate area."

So what happened to Omega? I'm guessing you won.

Incidentally, I did some digging around, at it turns out that the other Omega facility that we found in the previous update is actually the main entrance to the old Omega station and there isn't a way in. Whatever the reality of the Omega/SGS conflict will forever remain a mystery to us.

"Half of them are dead now and others are scattered over the rest of the Underrail. So, yeah, we won."

"You killed half of them?! Why?"

"Hey, I don't have time to teach you bloody history. Life is tough, especially here in the south. We did what had to be done."

Gorsky is very much the ruthless arm of SGS' ruling council. There may well have been another way to solve the disputes between the two stations, but Gorsky is not the sort of person you put in charge of that situation if you ever expected to peacefully negotiate.

That's all ancient history to us of course.

"Enough of that, now. We have work to do."

"What's going on here exactly?"

"I need you to find the way to open that door. There must be a security card somewhere which unlocks it. Your job is to find it."

"You might need to get to the levels below. The elevator is out of commission because the place is running on auxiliary power, so be resourceful."

"I'm to go down there alone? What are the rest of you going to do?"

"We'll continue trying to open the door manually. What? Are you scared of a few rathounds? Go get the bloody door opened, you ninny."

I don't know why they need three people to not open a door, but whatever.

In the nearby room we find the remnants of a rathounds lunch no doubt. We can hear the ominous sounds of fly's buzzing.

More Omega means more Omega Id cards, hooray!

In the next room we find our very own omni-tool. This can be used to open or close ventilation shafts, which will definitely come in handy. Do note you do need lockingpicking skill to actually use this, so if you make a character who doesn't have any, you better have the strength to use a crowbar or else you probably won't be doing a lot of vent crawling.

At the southeast corner of the map we find a Power Generator. All we can really do with it is either disable the auxiliary lights on this floor and or power the elevator. We power the elevator.

This floor is infested with rathounds to punch.

We hack our way into this room. Note there are vents on this floor we can use to make our way around if we didn't have a means to unlock some of the doors and or wanted to stay hidden, but we're okay for the time being.

Inside is another Omega id card and a key that I believe unlocks some door on this floor. This room also has a hidden wall safe if you're perceptive enough.

There's a cave entrance in the south wall which we'll explore for a bit.

There isn't a great deal down here.

Just a lot of rathounds and an alpha.

Who still have yet to adapt their tactics to our heavy ordinance.

There isn't really much reason to come in here, but for us, we manage to pick up another fancy rathound ear.

TWO fancy rathound ears. We can stop hunting rathounds from now on, unless we really need some organs, or leather.

East of this location is some rubble that cuts us off from the rest of upper caves.

Back in the warehouse again, we sneak past the powered elevator, I don't bother using it but there are two other floors below this one, the lowest floor is inaccessible however.

Presumably we would be able to kite these rathounds back to Gorsky and co. We'd probably get a stern frowning at by Gorsky if we did though.

More propaganda.

Blueprints that allow us to make bullets. Bullets are made by combining 30 empty bullet casings in the caliber of your choice, with TNT, and a metal plate. Good to cheaply replenish ammunition as you accumulate spent bullet casings.

There is also a key card that is for a surveillance room that we haven't found yet.

Here I find some 6p shotgun shells. Shotgun ammo comes in four different kinds, 20p (hopper shot), 12p (hound shout), 6p (boar shot) and 3p (train shot). The bigger the number the more pellets you fire but the weaker the shot will be. I've never been terribly good with shotguns in this game, they're powerful and they hit multiple targets, but they're slow to fire which I always found limited their effectiveness. But I'm sure there's ways to make them work well.

This door also needs to be hacked, we can hear howling coming from the other side.

On account of the rathounds.

Inside the lockers, we find one of the most useful drugs in the game. Adrenaline shot. This is why we're collecting all the adrenal glands we find, and it's why we're aiming for 40 biology as quickly as possible. For no AP cost at all, you can inject yourself with this and you get a free 20 AP, some defensive boosts and 2 points of strength. The important thing for us the 20 AP.

This is huge.

So often you'll get into a fight and almost finish it, but if your enemy gets to move next, they'll either kill you or very likely heal themselves and waste all your effort. Hit a bit of adrenaline and you'll have enough speed to finish the fight, and or put yourself into a better position.

Be careful with them, they wear off in three turns and then you'll enter a fatigued state that reduces your AP for a few turns. Which is bad if your still in a fight. We will take and make as many of these as we can.

More id cards push us into the next level!

We keep upping our stats as usual, the main thing is that we've gotten our melee to 40.

Now we can take the cheap shots feat.

Better criticals and our punches can potentially incapacitate? Yes please.

Our tailoring should now be high enough that we can make our own repair kits.

We head down the stairs at the back, nothing to do here but head deeper into the facility.

Welcome to level 2 of the GMS warehouse. This is where its going to get tricky for us.

As soon as we step onto the floor, an alarm goes off warning us there are Sentry Bots out looking for us. Joy.

We can take the stairs down further, but there isn't much down here and the rest of the stairs are buried in rubble.

There's a small storage room past the stairwell.

We find an antidote. These are really handy when dealing with poisonous enemies, naturally. We'll want to keep a few of these on our person in case of emergencies. Unlike in the original Fallout's, these are never stop being useful.

Heading down from here we run into a security room.

We pick up some EMP grenades, very handy against robot enemies. Especially for us given our lack of other means to deal with them. As well as doing a good chunk of electricity damage they also stun robots for a turn.

Careful not to get hit in the blast radius however, any electrical attack that hits you will automatically drain any electrical items in your inventory to zero. So you'll need to recharge everything each time you're hit, which is very annoying.

More id cards.

We also find a HE grenade. I think these are supposed to sacrifice the amount of damage you do in exchange for being better at penetrating armor. So in theory they're better at killing robots.

Honestly I tend to find these to be pretty ineffective in most situations, but maybe I've never given them much of a chance. At any rate we can currently make these too, but we would substitute a thin grenade case for the frag case. They also come in Mk II, III, IV and V varieties too.

The cool thing about the monitoring room is we can see through the security cameras to safely inspect the area.

We can see the bot are definitely patrolling.

The security cameras are hostile to us and will lure the bots to our location, so we just stick to the perimeter for the time being. We equip our sledgehammer because it can actually hit robots.

We pick our first victim. This is a small sentry bot which is much weaker than other sentry bots on this floor.

The sledgehammer dismantles in quick order, but we only get two swings per turn given the high level of AP they require to swing. Thankfully the small ones aren't a problem for us at all.

These two doors need 50 hacking to get through, we're nearly there, another level and we could access them. It's not that big a deal though, there's nothing but psi boosting stuff in there. Actually one of the doors has a crumbling wall that we could also blow open with explosives if we had any too.

Down in the bottom south east there's a trap door in the floor to our next destination, but we're not done with this floor yet. We can see the silver eye of the security camera that means we can't use stealth on them. We bash it down with our sledgehammer.

More propaganda to marvel.

I decide to pick a fight with the larger sentry bots patrolling around. Note the shelf near to the bot has a secret door next to it, with an oddity inside. Alas, our perception.

Anyway, the sentry bot starts off by giving us a taste of our own medicine. These little fuckers have their very own tasers.

And not only can I barely swing this hammer, I'm also not very accurate with it either.

Oh and robots also get flashbangs too!

At this point my hammer is badly damaged, I'm missing too often and this bot only has to stun me one more to make me completely helpless.

And I completely whiff the killing blow.

Twice in a row, at this point my healing items are on cool down, I have no AP (and I forgot to hit the adrenaline).

And it stuns me a second time! So I reload.

This time I get some better hits in and manage to return the stunning favor with a well placed EMP grenade. A taser would have worked too.

I take out my frustrations on the cameras.

Fists aren't very good at doing this by the way. Note that the monitors back in the security room will go dark if you break their subsequent camera.

In the back room is an Encyclopedia Fragment oddity.

In the middle of the room is a dead body of someone who was shot recently. Hmmm.

He's got the key to the trap door.

More propaganda.

And that's essentially all there is to this floor. This place can be a bit of a challenge as some builds are pretty weak against robots. Hopefully we'll devise some better strategies and equipment to deal with the far greater robot threats that await us down the line.

This door has more howling coming from behind it.

There's the last omega id card we'll need in here, there was also a rathound. There is also a open vent in this room. If we explore the vents on this level we would find that its full of rathounds. I don't really need to fight any of these and there's plenty more rathounds to kill in this game to come.

But it does go to show that vents aren't simply just a means to side step a hostile area in this game all the time. More often than not, vents will instead propose a different sort of challenge to an area that you can attempt if the general approach proves not to your liking. Sometimes, vents will be the worse option.

Anyway, let's head down the trap door and into, a trap!

She levels her crossbow at the old man. I thought you said we've got everyone, gramps."

"You do! You do! She ain't with us, I swear!"

"Don't move a muscle, sister! Who the hell are you?"

If we were persuasive/intelligent enough we could potentially convince them to take us to their leader, we could then potentially convince their leader that we're just here for the access card and then we're on our merry way. It's a hard series of checks to pass, and it will leave some vulnerable people in the hands of raiders. So instead, we try a different tactic.

"I'm your worst nightmare."

The lady with the crossbow gets us pretty good.

I throw a net over the guy with the knife.

Tase the other.

And beat them dead before they know what's happening.

The old man immediately starts talking to us.

"What is going on here exactly?"

"They stormed our barricade... they killed some. The others are held hostage in the dining hall."

"Who are they?"

"I don't know... slavers maybe, or just common bandits. I didn't hear them say what they want before I was dragged here to help them access the upper levels."

I'm not sure if there are any slavers in Underrail. There's definitely bandits who take people prisoner, but you don't really find slaves per se.

"Are they well armed?"

"Most of them have pistols. There might be more of them with crossbows... Oh, and there's this guy with a
sledgehammer. They don't have much armor on as far as I could tell, though."

"Barricade?"

"There's a breach that leads to the caves. Don't know how long it was there, it's how we migrated here. We set up a barricade with an auto-turret to protect it... but it didn't do us much good today."

I'm not really sure who these people are supposed to be exactly, it's never really explained. This also isn't a part of a quest to rescue them or anything. This is an entirely incidental hostage situation, that's happening whilst we're looking for a key card.

"So what do you propose we do?"

"I have an idea. They destroyed the auto-turret at the barricade because they were ready for it, but there's still
another deactivated one near the elevator."

"If you could activate that turret while they are not expecting it, it'll rip them to shreds! At least those out in the hallway. It'll make dealing with the rest of them easier."

In my test run, I was able to take on the raiders by myself, but let's do it their way, we have the skills for it.

"So how do I activate the turret?"

"Just left of the elevator, there's a surveillance room. Security console is there as well. The problem is, it's locked. Maybe Sully has the keycard, but I think he's being held hostage in the dining hall. You'll have to hack your way into the surveillance room and then hack the console to gain access to auto-turret controls."

"Alright, got it. You stay here."

"Good luck.... Oh, and by the way, be sure to turn the turret off afterwards. It might think you're an intruder as well and shoot you down if you come near it."

There was a key to the nearby door on one of the bodies. Although we could just use the vents in this room to move around.

But we'll do some recon first.

Just up the hallway we find the bulk of the raiders patrolling the main hallways. There's actually three of them out there. Note that the cameras on this floor are thankfully not hostile to us.

There's a key to one of the bedrooms on a body by the sandbags.

There's nothing else back here but some toilets.

Okay vents time. We'll crack open this vent here.

Vents always look a little strange, There's apparently a lot of head room in them. Vent systems can be a little maze like, not all vents are connected to all others, and there can often be blockades and secret passages in vents too.

We can also peer through vents to get an idea on what's on the other side, which is neat.

Up ahead we find the rest of the hostages being held by the remaining three raiders. We'll take a subtler approach to rescuing these guys. But we'll deal with the ones outside the room first.

We pop the vent out at the end.

And we're right outside the security room.

Inside we find a useless id card for us and there's some poisoned caltrops, and some pill cases that we can use in several drugs recipes.

On one of the monitors we can see the deactivated gun turret. This will give a nice view of the coming carnage.

With our hacking skill this terminal is no problem for us.

Hack

Attempt to gain access to Level 1

Hacking successful. Access upgraded to level 1

Access Level: 1

Security

Security Auto-turrets

Activate Auto-turrets

Operation completed successfully.

The gun has no issues tearing through the guys out in the hall.

I sometimes find one of the guys is outside of the effective range of the turret and have to wait for him to run out of ammo to get close enough. Although sometimes turning the turret off and on again helps it hit the guy too.

I safely turn the turret back off and we get free reign of the floor.

One of the guys has some midazolam on him. We can use this to make tranquilizer bolts.

I tear up their clothes.

And use it to replenish my nets.

And finally make myself some new patching kits.

One of the guys has some adaptive goggles on him, handy for ranged builds and giving you a nice boost to your perception. Won't do enough for us to make a difference though.

Before I deal with the hostage I'll loot the nearby bedrooms.

You know I just realized this floor kind of looks very similar to the sleeping quarters floors in Vault 13 in Fallout. Maybe I'm looking too much into that.

We've found ourselves some nice valuable guns.

A free gas mask, it's in rough condition, but we can fix that, with a bio resistance of 35% / 17 this will keep us safe from most poisonous gas sources. Most of them.

More useless oddities.

In this room we find the key card we came down here for. We could just leave, there's nothing to be gained by helping these people. But we will help them, nobody else will.

Time to test out our mk II grenades.

My aim isn't spot on, but at least I didn't hit the hostages, the leader of the raiders goes down in one hit, but one of them is unscathed.

He gets a few shots out on us.

The hostages panic and start getting in the way. But our taser ends the threat.

This particular bandit actually has our very first unique weapon on him, you can note a unique item by the purple text. In this case its the Jacknife. This is a pretty popular weapon amongst those that build. It's pretty useless as an actual knife, but when you hold it in your hand, you get a free 7 point boost to your lockpicking and traps skill. That's more than one non-initial level too.

A lot of people like to keep this in their off hand and pull it out whenever they need to pick locks to save on adding too many points into lockpicking. I'm uncertain if I'll remember to use it at all but whatever it doesn't weigh much.

The leader has another assault rifle.

But let's chat to the leader of the hostages.

"We don't have much to offer in return for your assistance. If you see something that you need, just take it. It is not like we could stop you anyway. There's been enough bloodshed today as it is."

"I need you to tell me about the sealed door at the first level. Do you know how I can open it?"

"My friend Bloomberg sealed that door one day. He wouldn't say why but he never allowed any of us to go there, nor do I think he ever went there himself since. If there's a key to open that door, he should have it.

"And where is Bloomberg now?"

"They... shot him near the barricade when they attacked us. You might want to take a look in his room, though. It's the one nearest to the elevator."

"I'll do that."

"You are welcome to stay here as long as you want."

"How long have you guys been here?"

"Almost three months now. For a while it seemed like a perfect place to settle, but recently we discovered some bandits that set up camp to the north."

If we exit out through the cave exit on this level we could go find the rest of the bandits. They're a lot harder and more entrenched than these guys we just dealt with. So we will leave it for a future endeavor.

He sighs. "It was inevitable that they would eventually discover this base, but I guess we thought we could defend our position... with the barricades and the turret."

"We... we should have left... I know that now." He seems choked up. "It was my fault."

"Are you going to remain here?"

"I think it be better if we left. If these raiders were a part of a bigger organization, this place is not safe anymore."

This, doesn't happen. Usually this game is good about having characters leave areas and settle in at different locations. Like with Newton for instance. But in this case, these guys will just hang out down here for the rest of the game. A lot of this area feels kind of like a beta test or something, what with the non-quest hostage situation and the half-finished resolution to it all.

"Hang in there, man."

Well we take the time to raid their food supplies.

And harvest their organs.

Normally at this point I would leave by taking the nearby elevator. It's broken, but with enough mechanical skill we can fix it and ride it back to the top. But, I actually don't have enough mechanical skill, so we'll have to take the long way back.

We can take the stairs up one level and there's a few rathounds to punch and little else.

So we'll just back track up through the trapdoor and make our way back to Gorsky.

"There are people on the lower levels of the compound."

"So?"

"Some raiders held them hostage, but I helped them."

"Well done. Now, you got the key card I asked you to find?"

Gorsky will not be happy with us if we went back and asked for help with the hostages. He doesn't care and sees it as a fact of life.

"I've found the key card that should open that vault."

"Good work. Let's give it a try."

Uh oh.

All of that just to discover a horrible burrower infested cave.

"Well, at least now I know you are someone who can get the job done."

"Here's your payment."

But surely we can handle a few burrowers, right?

"Wait, I wanted to investigate that..."

"Are you insane? I'm not having that door open for one more second. Do you know what those creatures can do? Burrowers are not to be messed with unless absolutely necessary."

If we had decent persuade we could talk him into giving us the access card. I wouldn't recommend going in there at this stage anyway but it's nice to have the ability to I guess.

[Persuade] "Come on, it's a scavenging opportunity. Who knows what I might find?"

"It's not a scavenging opportunity, it's a death wish. And if it was just your hide that you were risking, I wouldn't give a drat, but I can't have those critters getting out and about. You are not getting this key card. Now get out of here!"

If you can't persuade him however, there is another way to get in there, two if you count pickpocketing I guess.

"Let's pack it up, boys."

Time to return to SGS.

Home sweet home.

Music - City Station

Here's how we can get the access card off of Gorsky.

"I found a nest of burrowers over at GMS."

His stare reveals genuine interest. "Really? How many are there? Were you able to collect some venom glands?"

"I'm afraid not. It's sealed off behind a solid steel gate and Gorsky won't give me the access card."

"Unacceptable! I'll call him immediately. I'll even go to Tanner if I have to. They know I need all the venom glands I can get for my research."

"You just go talk to Gorsky again in a minute and he better give you that access card then."

"If you get to hunt down some burrowers, I'll gladly trade for their venom glands. Be careful, though, these critters will not relinquish them for free."

Oooh Gorky's in trouubllee...

As friendly as ever Gorsky. Let's see if he's any more open about Omega.

"What can you tell me about the Omega?"

"They used be our neighboring station. Now they're mostly dead. Those who aren't, they are scattered throughout Underrail."

"What happened?"

"A bloody war happened, that's what. Our relations shattered into pieces and we fought each other until one side got eradicated."

"Were you involved?"

"Yes."

"Can you tell me how it started?"

"No. Listen, it's complicated, the whole thing, and I'm not interested in explaining it to you."

I think that's about as much as we'll ever know what happened.

"You find someone else for that."

"I want to investigate that infested vault in GMS."

"Yes, I know. Quinton called and raved about his experiments for full ten minutes before I could ask him what he bloody wanted!"

"It's your worthless hide. But if tomorrow I wake up in a station full of freaking burrower spawns, it's you I'm going to kill first. He hands you the key card back."

This is the line he would have said to us if we had persuaded him back in GMS.

Let's go report our success to Tanner.

"I'm done with Gorsky's task. What's next?"

"Actually, there's not much to do around the station at the moment. Not until the tunnel is clear. However, there's a way you could speed that up, besides helping with the actual digging yourself."

"The station has an old Armadillo mobile drill. It used to serve us well for many years but it's out of commission now. There's something wrong with its rotor circuit board."

"Harold tried to fix it a couple of times, but it was no use. He reckons that the only solution is to replace it."

"So I guess you want me to find the replacement circuit board?"

Or a merchant that would sell one, yes.

"Since the train is out and a lot of tunnels have collapsed, there are not many places you can look for it at the moment. Our best bet would be Junkyard. Ever been there?"

"No. What's 'Junkyard'?"

We obviously do, but let's get Tanners rundown of the place.

"It's a town just across the Chancer's Bay, built around, and from, an old junkyard. It's a dangerous place run by two rivaling gangs, the Scrappers and the Black Eels. But most importantly, Junkyard is the main trading hub for the southern region. There is plenty to be found there: weapons, equipment, materials, spare parts... and hopefully the circuit board we need."

"How do I get there?"

"Essie or Jonas can give you instructions on how to get there. Alternatively, you can take a ferry there but that will cost you."

"I'll give you two hundred fifty charons. If you bring me back that circuit board and it's in working condition, you can keep all the money. I won't ask how you got it."

"But if you can't find it, I want the money back."

It's not much but at least he's giving us real money this time.

"Deal. I'll be back with the circuit board or with your money."

He nods and hands you the money. "Good luck."

Once that Armadillo circuit board is in our hands, I consider that to be the end of the early game. If you can successfully get a build to that point, you can be pretty confident that you're build is viable enough to handle anything this game throws at you. It won't be easy though, this next task is the real trial by fire.

"Also, before you head out you should go to the administration floor and talk to Vera. I think she has some trade documents that she needs delivered to the United Station embassy in Junkyard."

We'll head down to Vera to pick up those trade documents before I forget to bring them with me. I always forget to bring them with me.

"Tanner mentioned you need some documents delivered to an embassy in Junkyard."

"That's right. If you're heading that way you can deliver them for me."

Sure, I'm going there right now.

"Great. Here are the documents. I'll let them know that you're coming."

Doing this won't affect our standing with the Protectorate in any way, we aren't picking sides by doing this.

"Have a safe journey and send my regards to the ambassador."

"See you later."

Next time, we'll be taking out the trash in Junkyard.

Zeniel fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Jan 6, 2023

# ? Jan 6, 2023 01:49

Szarrukin: Sep 29, 2021

I wish there was a way to turn off cameras (other than destroying them)

# ? Jan 6, 2023 02:08

Tin Tim: Jun 4, 2012; Live by the pun - Die by the pun

I do remember that I liked the hostage sidequest in this part. It taught me a lot about tactics and what you can do in the game during my early runs. Iirc I tried to be fancy with Flashbangs when it came to the last hostages :v:

Oh and I was among those that felt big enough to explore the Burrower cave early. You can guess how that went.

Stashing things in the trashcan by the Junkyard weapon trader is a great idea! Never did that myself as I didn't know which containers were safe. I think I always carried all my stuff back to my room in the station. Tedious but that's the packrat life! Do you happen to know what containers are safe to use as storage?

Also I'm looking forward to the Junkyard in general. I remember that one of the main components of my various stabs at the game was to get my character to a point where I could survive what's coming.

Szarrukin posted:

Yes, from all "Fallout spiritual successors" - Encased, Atom, Underrail - it's definitely the best one (also the only one not LP'ed by TheGreatEvilKing)

Oh hey Encased is also in my library. And just like with this game I stopped playing after sinking time into one of the early builds and then didn't come back after the major updates. That's not a knock against the game though. What I remember of it was pretty good overall. The version I played had some issues with the writing though. The first station still had all its dialog from an old version of the game that didn't make sense anymore and the big part at the end of the early game plus the transition from it was kind of messy and confusing imo. I think the updates were good but I just never found the time to get back into it. One of these days...

Tin Tim fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Jan 6, 2023

# ? Jan 6, 2023 03:46

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Tin Tim posted:

Do you happen to know what containers are safe to use as storage?

I'm guessing by safe you mean that the game won't erase the inventory after some time.

In which case, as far as I am aware, any container should be perfectly safe to store your equipment in. At least I've never had issues with any that I've used as stashes.

Containers don't refresh their inventories or anything at any point in a given playthrough so it should be fine. Although obviously I haven't truly tested this but I don't see why it would work any other way.

Tin Tim posted:

Encased.

This is a game I've been meaning to try at some point. It looks pretty interesting.

# ? Jan 6, 2023 04:50

Enrico la Spaniard: Dec 15, 2021

I also started a character for Encased after the final release but never really came back to it. I keep meaning to, but I'm always hearing stories/reading reviews saying that while the early game is pretty good, the quality of writing and plot variety drops off after the first act. Can anyone back that up?

# ? Jan 6, 2023 13:19

King Doom: Dec 1, 2004; I am on the Internet.

Are there any decent save editors or editing guides available for this?

# ? Jan 7, 2023 00:16

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

King Doom posted:

Are there any decent save editors or editing guides available for this?

Not that I know of. There is a cheat engine someone made somewhere, but it doesn't let you edit your primary attributes, which is what I wanted to do back when I wanted to just see what different stats did.

Apart from that, I don't know of any save editor, I think the game files are meant to be difficult to mess around with for some reason.

Zeniel fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Jan 7, 2023

# ? Jan 7, 2023 14:49

Zeniel: Oct 18, 2013

Chapter 8 - This City is Garbage

Music - Citystation

Now that we've gotten our last task for this stretch of the game, let's make some final preparations and then head over to Junkyard.

We'll got have a quick chat with Pasquale to get the next lead in the Mushroom Cove Scavenger quest.

"Where can I find this Chester Royce?"

I believe the name, gender and familial relation of Joshua Royce and possibly Chester can vary between playthroughs if you get this quest.

"I think he sailed over from Junkyard. You can catch a ferry ride there down at the docks, cave level."

"But whether he returned there or not, I don't know. And I didn't ask. The whole encounter... He took it hard."

"I have to go."

We pickup the blueprints for health hypos, as well as psi boosters and inhalants.

We head down to Quinton and pick up some magnesium. So we can live the mag life.

Now we can make us some Magnesium Grenades. These can turn a dicey situation into a more pleasant situation. Or make things even dicier if you have poor aim.

We also grab more explosives to keep our grenade supplies healthy and then we head for the docks.

"I need to get to Junkyard."

"Hmm... alright. I'll take you there for eight charons, or twenty-five credits if you got those."

We could pay in Charons but we want those to actually buy things, so she gets our monopoly money instead.

Give her 25 SGS credits.

Music - Junkyard

Right so we're looking for a circuit board. Let's go have a chat with some merchants and see if they have one. Starting with the Black Eels trader, Colton.

"Would you happen to, by any chance, have an Armadillo class drill rotor circuit board?"

"No. I've got lots of junk, but I ain't got any Armadillo parts. Doubt any merchant here got those either."

"Maybe ya can find those at the Old Junkyard, can't be sure."

"Tell me about Old Junkyard."

"'Old Junkyard', 'Depot A'. It's the original junkyard this town was built next to from the scrap our predecessors
found there. It's a restricted area now, though, on account of some accident with a mutagen tank that happened a long time ago."

Depot A is pretty infamous in this game as being the point where the game stops playing nice. I wouldn't call it part of this games bullshit, but it is a step up in challenge from what we've been doing so far.

"It's a crazy zone now: rabid dogs, mutants, flipped-out auto-turrets..."

"There's still lots of valuable junk there, though, and ya got Scrappers still doin' raids there. And they ain't lettin' many other folks get in. That's the problem, ya see - those bastards control the gate. It's in their freakin' base."

"So there's no other way in?"

He lowers his voice as he looks about. "Now, I didn't say that. Ya know what they say - where there's will there's a way."

"If ya absolutely need that Armadillo part, the Black Eels might be able to help ya."

"How so?"

"Talk to Silas, the dockmaster. Tell him Colton sent ya and that yer interested in the 'wormhole.' He'll tell ya more
about it."

Dockmaster Silas is just in the room next door so let's go have a chat.

"Tell me about the Black Eels. Are you the head honcho?"

"We control the docks and all the nearby waterways, and through that all the naval trade. It's quite a lucrative
business too. Our biggest customers are here in the South, but you'd be surprised how many fancy pants "civilized" Northern stations come to us in search of various parts and raw materials."

"Scrappers control the Old Junkyard, true. But there's plenty of heaps this side of the fence too and, unlike the 'crazy zone' raids, it doesn't cost lives to salvage it. And, besides, it ain't like the Scrappers can ship their stuff anywhere without our help."

"As far as the leadership is concerned, I'm the guy in charge of the docks and that's all you need to know, station
girl."

I don't think Silas is actually the head of the Black Eels, they're scattered all across Chancer's bay, but Silas is our in with them.

"I'm here about the 'wormhole.'" Colton said you're the man to talk to."

"You look green, girl. Whatcha need the wormhole for? You got a death wish?"

"I'm looking for something specific I can't find on the market."

"Must be somethin' special if it's worth riskin' your hide. The wormhole can get you in and out, but it's gonna cost you."

"How much?"

"Usually I ask for money but I got another deal for you... If you're interested."

"Let's hear it."

"I need someone to solve a couple of problems for me. Maybe get her hands dirty in the process. Dig what I mean?"

Both of the gangs in Junkyard will have a handful of tasks for us to do. We can basically do them all except the very last ones for either before we will have to take sides. I will leave it up to the thread which gang we ultimately side with.

"It shouldn't take you too long and you might even earn some charons on the side as well. Soundin' good so far?"

"Go on."

"There's a guy that owes me a hefty amount of coins. And not only that, but he's also late on his protection money. I
don't think he's got it, though, but shake him down, see if he has somethin' else of value."

"If not, well, we still gotta send a message what happens when ya try to swindle the Black Eels. Right?"

"So you up for this?"

"Yeah, sounds like fun."

"Excellent. The guy's name's Grover. He lives in a shack just north of the tavern, right next to Len's shop. Get him to
pay up one hundred charons he owes me or somethin' of equal value. If he can't pay up - bring me his ugly head."

We've seen Grover before, we will go speak with him eventually.

We head north of the docks into the Junkyard's residential area, there's not much to see here unless we want to rob some heavily monitored places, so we head west to the slums.

In the slums, we can find a fence you can hop over with a high enough agility, this will allow you to side step a nearby blockade.

A blockade of chucklefucks.

"I'm on official business from South Gate Station. I don't need to pay any fees."

"You is gonna pay like everyone else, southgater. Besides, what's a couple shinies for you SGS folk?"

Um quite a lot thank you very much, have you SEEN the exchange rates?

"So what's the fee?"

"For a pretty girl like you..." It takes a few seconds before his stare travels all over your body. "make it five charons. Mhm."

Welp he's a dead man. Although 5 charons is a pretty tiny amount, and one we'll never have to pay again either.

"Alright, I'll pay." Pay 5 stygian coins.

We're not quite ready to put them in the ground just yet, so they can have our measly 5 Charons.

The slums of Junkyard are full of hungry poor all hanging outside the United Station embassy. I guess I was slightly wrong with the food crisis commentary, although I think this is about as much as we ever see.

South of here is Junkyard's electronics merchant.

"Would you happen to by any chance have an Armadillo class drill rotor circuit board?"

"No drill parts, sorry. Ain't got anythin' of the kind."

"Good luck findin' it, though. That junk's old. I've only ever seen one... yeah, one Armadillo, and that
thing was stripped down to the bone. All the way to the bone, sis."

"Any hints as to 'here I should look?"

"Well, uh, I mean, you can try the bigger junk merchants at the docks and the Depot B. If that fails, there might be one somewhere in Depot A, but it ain't worth riskin' your neck."

"What's so bad about Depot A?"

"Rabid mutated dogs for starters, that much I know myself. Granted, I've never been too far in, but those who have and returned in one piece claim there are also rogue turrets, mine fields and even mutated folks in there. All sorts of freakin' dangerous stuff."

Mutated folk are basically this games Ghouls. Although if you think they have it rough in Fallout, hoo boy.

"If you really want to check it out for yourself, you gonna have to convince Scrappers to let you in, 'cause the
entrance to Depot A is, well, it is from within their base."

"Before I leave, there was something else I wanted to ask you."

"Shoot."

"How come your store is here in the slums?"

Yeah this place isn't really trade central.

"This the only buildin' I could get my hands on."

"And it ain't that bad, sis, seriously. There ain't any really comfortable place to live in Junkyard unless you one of the wealthier merchants with a place in the residential district, or a high rankin' gangster."

"So how's life in the slums?"

"For me, it's alright. I make enough coin from tradin' with the local customers and folks from the outside. Yeah, it's alright."

"But for those poor saps out there it must be terrible. They surrounded by heavily armed men from all sides. They can do little to protect themselves."

"I mean, it's bad enough they gotta keep an eye out for their neighbors that might knife them in their sleep for a piece of cave hopper meat or an eel, or some petty coin - or just 'cause they derailed, but gangsters and thugs also sweep in from time to time to take whatever they fancy."

"The Protectorate promises to bring the Union laws and protection, but so far nothin' has changed. Nothin'. Lotsa hobos just take to the caves instead, spelunkin' around, and maybe they right in doing so. Heck, they might not find more safety, but at least there's more food to be found out there."

"Show me what you have."

We don't have much to purchase from Katherinet at the moment, but we do pick up a few extra batteries.

West of Katherine's shop, we can have a chat with one of people squatting nearby.

"What did you have in mind, old timer?"

It's important to be polite to Kohlmeier, he will not talk to you if you're rude to him.

He beckons you closer. "I didn't always live in a tent, you know. I used to live in the residential area to the east. Really, I did."

"I lived in a comfy house on the east side. Oh, yeah. But, one day I couldn't pay protection money to the Eels anymore so they kicked me out. Heartless bastards. However, I'm not gonna waste your time with my... sob story, no."

"The important... bit is that I know a secret way back into my old home. And I also know that its current occupant has quite a bit of coins lying around there."

"So what would you want in return for this information?"

"The only thing I want is for you to get my lucky knife. It's gotta be lying around somewhere in there. The knife won't be of nuch use to... you since it's not a particularly good knife for combat, but it's of sentimental value to me. Do you dig?"

"What do you say? We got a deal?"

"Deal. Now tell me how to get in there."

"Great. So about getting in.. Obviously, you could try the front door if you think you can hack the lock, but it's also being watched by the Eels."

"The smart thing to do would be to go to the docks and look for the small shack north of the berths." He nods. "The rocks between the shack and the cave wall can actually be dislodged there without breaking a sweat, and you look skinny enough to squeeze through. Not saying you're a squeezer, mind you, just that you're... thin enough. That's all."

"That'll give you access to a tunnel that will lead you straight into the mushroom garden of my old house. I discovered this passage one day when I found a stinkin' rathound messing up my shrooms. Never got around to sealing it off."

"Speaking of that, there still might be rathounds in there, so tread carefully."

Seems easy enough, we'll get to that task soon.

"Alright. I'm off."

Up ahead we can see the heavily armed and armored guards of the protectorate keeping people from entering the United Stations embassy.

Nearby is the worlds most intimidating doctor.

"What's behind the fence?"

"United Stations embassy."

"Hence all these folks in front of it."

"What's the deal with all the people outside the embassy?"

"The United Stations are helpin' the Junkyarders in need. They're giving out food and clothes. Food..."

"That certainly bought their affection. Quite cheap, though, but them folks got next to nothin', so it makes sense."

"You don't like the United Stations?"

"Never said that. I also benefit from their 'generosity.' But what I said is true, them guys ain't stupid. They ain't. Ha..."

Fixer's a little unhinged, but his suspicions about the benevolence of the United Stations is not probably unwarranted.

"Can I ask you a few questions about Junkyard?"

"Ha... No."

"Why not?"

"I know where it's headed..."

Nice to find NPC's who don't want to play 20 questions with us.

"I just wanted to purchase some medical supplies."

So fixer is one of the best merchants in the game. Why? He sells the Adrenaline Shot blueprint. We do not hesitate to buy it.

In the far northeast we can see some more cave fisherman.

This guy is called Hopper Jim, he doesn't play all that much of a role in this game.

We head down to strike up a conversation with Geezer Ford.

"Hi there."

The man silences you with a swift gesture of his hand, for his prey is about to bite. The float disappears under the surface, and the rod bends downward. The fisherman grasps it tightly, yanking the rod as if he was expecting to pull a sunken ferry out of the depths. Soon enough, a small light-bluish eel flies through the air and ends its journey in the man's raw-boned hand.

Disappointed, he unhooks the fish with a single motion and gently releases it back into the water, in which it happily disappears. One of the two men standing nearby begins laughing but immediately stops before his and the old fisherman's stares meet, instead shifting his view to his own rather steady float.

The old geezer then resets the rod, and his few steps back and forth reveal a limp in his left leg. Then, he turns to you.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Why'd you let it back into the water?"

He turns the left side of his head toward you and leans closer, mouth wide open. "Didn't catch that. Could you speak up?"

Geezer Fords a little deaf so talking to him takes a bit of repetition.

"I said: Why did you release it back to the water?"

"What? The eel? I ain't gonna eat a tiny eel. It too small to feed a cat. No, you let 'em live and grow, and then you catch them and eat them. Or sell 'em, whatever."

"I see. Can I ask you a couple of questions?"

"What questions?"

"About you."

"I don't know you. Unless you a lost daughter of mine I ain't... Well, if you were I especially wouldn't wanna talk
to you."

"Erm... are you a spawn of me own?"

"No"
"

"Oh. Great. I hate kids."

Ford must be a happy man, given the lack of kids in this game.

"How about Junkyard then?"

"Go annoy someone else with that. I ain't a Junkyard guide. Besides, you wouldn't wanna ask the wrong people some of the questions you might have in the bag, woman."

"How about fishing then?"

He takes a look at his motionless float. "The water ain't good right now. I suppose I could spare a few moments."

"Very good. I'm Henrietta, by the way."

"Geezer Ford. That's what the folks around here call me. But for you, I'm Mr. Ford."

Mr. Ford is also someone we will want to be polite with, he will shut us down for good if we aren't respectful to him.

"Got it, Mr. Ford."

"Yeah. Go ahead now, ask your questions."

"Where'd you get that limp?"

"That ain't a fishin'-related question."

"It is if you got it while you were fishing."

He pauses. "Ah. Gotcha. But it ain't due to no fishin'. My one leg is shorter. I was born that way."

"There you go, woman. You got that one."

"So, how's the water here? In general, I mean."

"Well, it might seem stupid to someone lookin' from afar, like, what in hell's goddamn railroad are those slackers doin' by that muddy puddle. But, listen, there's an underwater tunnel connectin' to a whole system of caves which are full of 'em eels."

Eels are probably the most common sea life in Underrail.

He looks toward the tent and points to the man standing by the barrel. "See that ugly yo-yo there? His name's Hopper Jim. Quaker at heart. Centipedes, spiders and all kinda bugs scare the livin' ooze out of him. But, man, can he fish like a spawn of siphoner. He caught a fifty kilo eel right 'ere. Mmm-hm."

Sometimes the writing forgets to use articles now and again. I don't really mind, although it makes me wonder if I've pulled the text out properly though.

"Go on..."

"Now... it wasn't a regular ol' blue eel. It was a red behemoth with a yellow stripe on its side. I'd never seen
anythin' like it before. Now that's a catch! And I, bein' the best fisherman in whole Underrail... South Underrail definitely, ain't gonna let someone like Hopper Jim outdo me."

"What happened to the red eel?"

He leans forward, mouth open. "Whatcha say?"

"I said: What happened to the red eel Hopper Jim caught?"

"He sold it to one of them Northerner wimps. United Stations feller. He weighed less than that eel." He laughs. "Don't know how much he got for it, the bastard wouldn't tell."

"I think it be hangin' on some wall now, far as I heard."

"Did Hopper Jim beat some kind of record of yours by catching that red eel?"

"It ain't about the weight, if that's whatcha thinking, it about the principle. I've caught bigger fish. Sixty, seventy kilos - no problem. Hell, I was doin' ferry tours before Jim was even fillin' his diapers. I caught the largest slackjaw Core City's ever seen. I caught more walkin' fishes than he caught fleas bittin' into his skin. But he caught a fifty-kilo red eel in this pool right 'ere."

"That means I gotta catch somethin' better and bigger and rub it in his nose. If not a red eel, then somethin' else. That's what it all about, woman. That's what it all about."

"You think you're the best fisherman in Underrail? You?"

Now we don't to piss him off, but we do want to challenge him to the title of best fisherman in Underrail.

"Yeah." He squints at you with one of his eyes, while the other one sharpens up. "Somethin' botherin' you, woman?"

"I'm pretty sure there are better fishermen than you out there, old man."

"'Pretty sure' my wrinkly old butt, you brainless baggage. What do you know, huh? 'Cause you sure sound like you think you're some kinda big shot, yeah, talkin' to me, Geezer Ford, like that."

"You don't... you don't think you're better than me, eh?"

"Maybe I am."

"Oh? So you do think you're better than me? Alright. Alright. Prove it. Prove it, woman."

"How do you want me to prove it?"

He turns silent as his mind retreats to envision an appropriate challenge. "Eventually, it emerges with one.
I betcha you couldn't even do the southern tour."

"I could."

His suspicious eyes begin to burn you. "Do you even know what a southern tour is?"

Our intelligence let's us bluff our way through his questions.

(Intelligence) "You travel South Underrail and catch fish."

"What fish?"

"One of each species."

"Good. You ain't an absolute slackjaw. But that ain't provin' anythin'."

I'm not sure anything bad happens besides embarrassing ourselves in front of an old fisherman if we do guess wrong.

"Now, I ain't gonna ask of you to catch exactly every kinda fish there is, that'd take too long. I ain't gonna wait a year for a sorry excuse for a fisherman such as yourself to fish 'em all out."

"I betcha couldn't bring me one of each of these: pentapus, slackjaw, minihead, black dragon, phantom jelly, ghostface, anglerfish, demon squid, shrimp, walkin' fish. If you are good enough to do that, if you're an even remotely decent fisherman, then I'm gonna reveal one of my fishin' tricks, one I've never told anyone. Anyone."

Yeah so this is the fishing quest in the game. It's going to be a while before we can finish it, as some of the fish aren't found near here. One of them is going to be extremely hard to catch. We might have an easier time of it since our dexterity is so good, but we will see.

"I bet you I can catch them all."

Point me to your master balls good fisherman...

"Then do it. Then do it. But if you lose, you gotta go around Junkyard and say: 'Mr. Ford is the best fisherman in whole South Underrail' while I blow harder than two pufferfishes matin'."

Well, I don't know what that means, but you didn't stipulate a time window so sure.

"Deal."

"Deal. Now you better hurry up unless you want me to die of old age. Go."

"Goodbye, Mr. Ford."

I'm sure we'll come back to this quest many updates from now. It can pretty tedious and has a lackluster payoff, so I'm in no hurry to get it done.

Anyway, we came here with some trade documents so let's drop those off.

"What is this place?"

"This is an Underrail Protectorate outpost. It also houses the United Stations embassy."

"What is the Protectorate?"

"We are the most powerful military organization in Underrail, and our primary objective is preservation of
humanity as a whole and protection of the civilized world."

"Our jurisdiction extends to the whole of United Stations, all Biocorp facilities and outposts regardless of their
location and all vital Underrail infrastructure."

"What are the United Stations?"

"It's a confederacy of stations some ways to the north of here. It's the future of the Underrail and we hope to integrate all the station states and other... communities into it. Someday even this place might be part of it."

"You don't have any jurisdiction over this place, right?"

"The Junkyard is not a part of the Protectorate, no. But be advised that the embassy is sovereign territory of the
Protectorate and that I'm allowed and required to act to prevent and/or counteract any action that might endanger it or its staff regardless of jurisdictional boundaries."

"Can I see the ambassador?"

"Do you have business with the ambassador? Is he expecting you?"

"Yes, he's expecting me."

"And you are...?"

"Henrietta of South Gate Station."

He nods. "We were expecting you. You may enter the embassy. He unlocks the gate behind him."

"Thank you."

We quickly unequip all our weapons and everything from our belt.

The number of times I've forgotten to take things off my belt before going in here, I swear.

They aren't kidding, every Protectorate location will have a similar warning upon you entering. Fighting an entire room full of Protectorate, is technically possible, but would be a hell of a slog at this point. Certainly wouldn't attack from this direction either.

"When you enter the courtyard behind me, take the first double door to the right. The ambassador is expecting you."

"Do not interfere with any operations inside the base."

Make a note of the number of guards and defenses that we pass by in this place, there will be a test.

We enter the office of the secretary to the ambassador.

"What can you tell me about the ambassador?"

"Only the very best. Ambassador Athanas is one hard-working, intelligent man who is sincerely devoted to promoting and realizing the idea of unification here in South Underrail. It is a slow and time-consuming process, but the United Stations are gaining more and more support, thankfully."

"Now... the door to the ambassador's office may be always open, but that doesn't mean he's not a busy man, especially now."

"Please keep that in mind when going to his office. Thank you."

"Thank you, I will."

The ambassador presides over their office with their own personal bodyguard in the room.

"Can you tell me a bit about the United Stations?"

"Of course. We are an ever growing confederacy of stations. Our goal is to unite the remnants of humanity in order to ensure our survival and prosperity. United Stations are ruled by the Council of Five and guarded by the Protectorate."

"We bring peace, order and law to the stations that we integrate in this union, but also allow for a degree of independence. The stations are still free to choose their own local governing body."

"Our member stations are the safest and most prosperous in the Underrail."

"We haven't integrated any stations here in the South Underrail, but we're hoping that will change soon."

Yes, yes we've picked up like 10 pages of Protectorate Propaganda at this point. We don't need more spiel from actual Protectorate employees.

"Vera sent you these trading documents." Give him the documents.

"Very good, very good. Usually I would allow this sort of information to be wired, but we have reason to believe
that the network going through Junkyard might have been compromised. You never know who might be listening and what they can do even with harmless trading agreement info."

"Just so you know, as a representative of South Gate Station, you are free to move around most of the embassy premises, and can also use our elevator to South Railroad Outpost."

"It's out of order at the moment because of the earthquake, but we're working on fixing it."

"Who do you suspect has hacked the Junkyard network? South Railroad Outpost?"

We're not sure yet, but there's an ongoing investigation. Until further notice, I asked that any sensitive information coming from SGS and our other trading partners in the South be delivered physically."

"I'm sure we'll get to the bottom of this soon so that the communication can continue as before."

"I've heard of the name "Free Drones." Do you think these people could be behind the hacking of the Junkyard network?"

I'm pretty sure we've never heard of this name before, outside of that one piece of graffiti. So we'll assume we knew about them prior to joining SGS.

"I don't know. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'd rather not comment on it."

"We'll wait for the official investigation to complete, then we'll know for sure."

"What can you tell me about the Free Drones?"

"They're nothing but a group of violent anarchists. Sure, they cause some trouble to the Protectorate, but so do the Ironheads, Lunatics or other unwanted groups. They claim we're the bad guys, and they openly rebel against all of us, both the Protectorate and the United Stations. Us, who help stations survive these harsh conditions and protect their citizens against raiders and bandits!?"

The Free Drones are the main faction opposed to the continued encroachment of the United Stations into Southern Underrail. It's not needed to finish the game, but we'll want to pick a side here at some point.

"Sad, misguided people... but they are becoming a threat, and I'm afraid diplomacy can't help much there. Protectorate will have to apply harsher measures."

Think carefully about who we should join. This fight will get ugly.

"South Rail Outpost?"

"That's the metro base right above us. We use an elevator here in the embassy to quickly access it."

Later on we can use this elevator to quickly get between here and lower Underrail. Although I had thought you can use this elevator now, but I think I'm wrong about that.

"In fact, that's how we got to Junkyard in the first place - via railroad. Only later did we establish a waterways
route after acquiring Port Zenith in Core City as well as reaching a mutually acceptable agreement with the Black Eels."

"I have to go now."

"Take care, Miss Henrietta. Feel free to come back anytime if there is something you wish to discuss."

Next time, we will continue making waves around Junkyard.

It might a while before we do but VOTE on at this point, but who we should side with, the Scrappers or the Black Eels?

Zeniel fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jan 7, 2023

# ? Jan 7, 2023 18:15

Cheston: Jul 17, 2012; (he's got a good thing going)

Zeniel posted:

Not that I know of. There is a cheat engine someone made somewhere, but it doesn't let you edit your primary attributes, which is what I wanted to do back when I wanted to just see what different stats did.

Apart from that, I don't know of any save editor, I think the game files are meant to be difficult to mess around with for some reason.

You can edit primary attributes using cheat engine, but you have to do it during character creation (cus it's the only place you can change the values freely to scan for them). I used it to power myself up for an otherwise unwieldy crossbow/psi playthrough and had a good time.

I don't think you need the underrail plugin to do this, either, just scan underrail in character creation for your remaining number of attribute points (Exact Value - 4 Bytes), then spend a point and do a followup scan for the new number, rinse and repeat until you've found the right address and can give yourself as many points as you want.

# ? Jan 7, 2023 19:38

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# ? May 3, 2024 19:18

Szarrukin: Sep 29, 2021

I am currently at Depot A with my pure psi and god, I hate this place with the power of thousand suns. Not because it hard, but because it's the place when you realize you wasted X hours on crappy build.

I chose Black Eels on my playthrough, so I vote Scrappers

# ? Jan 7, 2023 21:50

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > This thread is derailed. Let's Play Underrail

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