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His video on Caves of Qud led to a lot of sales, but also the (very queer) community battening down the hatches for a few months.
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Mar 6, 2023 10:00
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I heard SS13 got a influx of new players through him and they were pretty much what you'd expect.
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Mar 6, 2023 10:44
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From what I understand Underrail also got significant number of sales from Seth's review but that is also about the same time Expedition which is so good that game would have gained popularity just on merit. edit: I am doing a second play through and the writing defiantly has another layer to it that you do not get the first time through. I am starting the Dude's quest and just about everything he says has a deeper meaning and you really get the sense that he isn't burnt out from the drinking; he is burnt out from cosmic knowledge that the human is ill equipped contain being beamed into his head and he drinks to deal with that. Even though you end up in the Grey Base I still love this quest I can't think of another game that has anything like this psychedelic bender. side_burned fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Mar 10, 2023 |
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Mar 6, 2023 22:37
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Chapter 46 - The University of South Underrail Welcome to upper underrail. It's not the biggest map, so we'll be exploring the vast majority of it shortly.  There's a guy named Sammy just standing by the train tracks, thinking about jumping. Upper Underrail also has a functioning railway network, so we can take the trains to any of the main places up here too.   The station also has a food vendor we can talk to.   "What can you tell me about the Arena?" "It's the reason people come to Core City - to witness the most beautiful carnage available in Underrail!" She laughs. "Some say it's cruel and evil and all that nonsense, but all contestants are there voluntarily. VOLUNTARILY. They fight 'cause they want the fame... and the coin. So, if you got the time off to see some hardcore domination - check it out! You won't regret it! You also won't regret tasting some of the food I've got to offer!" "How do you feel about the Faceless invasion?" "Well... it's a weird situation. When I first heard that the Faceless were cutting us off from the North, I panicked, I'm not gonna lie. It's hardcore stuff - you know what I mean - with the tunnelers and all that nonsense. The Praetorians managed to halt their advance for now, but I still got a bad feeling about it all. I heard the Faceless steal people and turn them into cyborgs, into more Faceless. If that is true, then they aren't going to stop until we've all been converted! Well, they aren't gonna catch me, no. I'm gonna drop off a ledge if they ever get into the city. This is all nonsense, hardcore nonsense..." "Do you know Moe, by any chance? He has a stall on the lower level." The instant you mention "his" name, her so-far pleasant Z1d amiable face gets shattered by an erupting volcano of emotions and its hot fragments fly toward your face, scorching it. Yet, she keeps silent, waiting for the inner boiling to die down. And soon it does, allowing her fissured, charred face to revolve back to the same me as before. Almost the same. She speaks with a more reserved voice. "We will not talk about 'him.' Is that understood? Let's pretend you never mentioned 'him,' and all will be well... and hardcore." "What's wrong? What did Moe ever do to you to deserve that much hate?" "Do not make me repeat myself! We are NOT discussing... 'him.'"Hm, I wonder what that's all about... "Understood. On to another topic." She nods. "Goodbye."We'll go quickly chat with Moe down in Core City and see what's the deal with him and Zilla.  "What can you tell me about Zilla?" "Oh... Zilla... There's not much to say about that derailed woman. She used to have a stall just across from mine. I don't even know why she chose that location since I already had mine set up here. She had nothing special to offer, and yet she wanted to compete! I had more customers, naturally because my food doesn't taste like it was soaked in siphoner fat, but that crooked-teeth nightmare started acting all derailed! She yelled at me for somehow 'stealing' her customers. I mean, what? She didn't pass the opportunity to kick my stall a couple of times! The Praetorian Security enforcers got her out of here soon after that. All hardcore. So she had to move to the Upper Underrail station from what have I heard. Meh, I don't care anyway. Good riddance!"Well there you go. There's nothing more to be found about this tiff, so we'll just be moving on. "Goodbye." So we'll poke about Core City station first. The stations in Upper Underrail are much larger, and Core City has four different platforms.  Each platform has some old canteens on them that seem abandoned. They've got a few small items in them.  They also have a connecting tunnel leading to the other platforms below them. Just like a real train station.  The sheer state of repair of the entirety of Upper Underrail, makes me think that these train tunnels probably existed prior to the creation of Underrail and we're likely very close to the surface here. Maybe. We'll explore this idea more in a bit.  The connecting passage doesn't have very much, just a room full of garbage and the heavy sound of flies buzzing.  In the far back in an interactable junk pile, there's nothing here at this stage, but we'll find a quest that involves this eventually.  In the center two platforms, is an old store room that the Praetorian Security have appropriated for themselves.  We can't take anything in there without starting trouble so we'll ignore it.  We head south along the tracks.  The vast majority of Upper Underrail is literally just old train tunnels.  There's still the odd random encounter up here.  Like the odd wizard in training.  The shortness of Upper Underrail makes it very easy to travel between the stations. Two screens away and we've already arrived a University station.   The connecting tunnel beneath it has another rift inside of it.   The main entrance to the old University is just north of the station.  We won't be able to enter the university until we're further along in the plot but we can look around its courtyard.  We run into a lady named Daphne.  "Maybe. What can you tell me about them?" "Oh. Well then... if you are - join the line, hah! But first, allow me introduce myself. I'm Daphne. Nice to meet you... ehm...?" "It's Henrietta. Nice to meet you too, Daphne." Henrietta. Got it. Okay, Henrietta, let's talk. "What can you tell me about yourself?" "I am a geneticist from Foundry." "What exactly do you mean by that?" "You see, Foundry is a station, town a - call it however you will - that revolves around a single thing - mining. Well,mining, processing and manufacturing products out of ore that has been mined out, true, but the most important aspect is that such place has no room for, say, a biologist. It's like a... like a... fisherman on a train station: He's got nothing to do, hah! Anyway, I had to get outta there." Makes me wonder how she became a geneticist if she's from there though. Although maybe she moved there later on in life. "How did you end up there in the first place?" "My parents brought me there when I was little. The money was good, sure, but if we had gone to South Gate or Rail Crossing we would've been golden. But, oh, well... I ended up there. Years went by, I grew older. 'No more will I waste my time in that dump,' I said to myself. I have aspirations, and I'm gonna study as much as I can, get out of that hole and move forward in life!"Okay well I guess they've got a really good genetics program at Foundry for some reason. "Isn't it a bit dangerous to travel around alone?" "Technically, it's more dangerous to live in Foundry, hah. I'm not exaggerating, Henrietta. Nope." "Why are you here and what can you tell me about this place?" "Well, I got tired of living in a polluted environment, that's one reason. The other is, well, this Institute of Tchort seems to need a lot of experts in the field of biology, genetics and similar. I'm not saying I'm an expert, but joining them could be the first step toward becoming one, hah. Besides, I'm sure they pay good money. Just look at the building."So the University is now the headquarters of the Institute of Tchort. We probably learned that a while ago when we last interacted with the Tchortists. "Do you even know why they need so many scientists?" "I know what you really mean: 'Are these guys some evil cultists that perform twisted experiments and torture people and if so, why would I want to join them?' Well..." She makes a slight1y longer pause. "Frankly, I don't know what's going on inside, but I know one thing: There is no other place in Underrail where you can go to and not ask yourself the same question, Henrietta. This whole world is... twisted, and... despite their strange appearance these Tchortists seem like... I mean... Look, I'm careful... if I sense anything too strange is going on - I will back out. I haven't lost all my senses from living in Foundry, hah. Got that one?"I'm sure they're just a perfectly ordinary religious organization. "What can you tell me about the Tchortists?" "From what I know, Institute of Tchort is a research organization that celebrates a creature called Tchort. Supposedly, that creature's genome is very unique and whatever they learned from it can be applied to humans as well. I've heard terms like 'directed evolution' and 'conquering the Surface,' but I won't comment on those until I know more. This is their main building; they supposedly have facilities in Deep Caverns as well. That's pretty much all I know, hah. It's not my fault, it's just that information on them is kind of scarce."All perfectly normal goals and occupancies of a run of the mill religious organization. "I have to go. Goodbye." The courtyard features and old cafe that is either abandoned or run by jerks.  Take this guy in the toilets for example.  Just not friendly at all...   The guy at the counter is blocking us from being able to loot the cash register and shelves too. What a bunch of jerks.   There's a guy who really loves this corner and next to him is an even bigger weirdo.  Touch him He slaps your hand. "Stop that! I will not allow some... petty mortal to touch me. How dare you!?" He ponders the situation for a moment. "The only reasonable explanation for you being able to see me must be that you possess some special gift... some special power, mortal. Yes... yes! That must be it!"Cale is a man of logic. A man of logic with some poorly chosen postulates. "Oh... That's good to know. Who are you anyway?" "I'm Cale, the Lord of Invisibility. I am the only one who has truly mastered the art of being in a state of gone - complete invisibility to the naked eye. 'Gone' is the proper term for such state, and it was I who came up with it."He's also pretty full of himself too. "That sounds pretty cool." "Of course, I can see how such divine things can impress a mortal being... such as yourself. Yes... would you be so kind to tell me your name?" "It's Henrietta." "Henrietta, you say. A mortal name indeed. Well, let's talk about that gift of yours, shall we?" "Let's..." "Tell me of this gift of yours. When did you first realize you were able to see invisible people?" "If you can see someone then he is not invisible." "You don't seem to understand the question, I... ugh... Working with mortals is painful... Let's try it like this: I am invisible; you can see me. Therefore, since common mortals can't see me, but you can - you must have some special ability which allows you to do so. That is the only logical conclusion. And if you..." He stops speaking. As his eyes shift away from you he begins scratching his beard. Soon after, he points his finger at you and speaks. "I understand now why you're so confused! HA! You haven't had the opportunity to see an invisible person because there wasn't an invisible person to see!" "What?" "You cannot answer my question about first noticing you had a gift which allows you to see invisible people because you never had the opportunity to see an invisible person. I - Cale, the Lord of Invisibility - am the first invisible person you were able to see and that is why the existence of your gift seems to perplex you so much. For one to know if he is capable of seeing invisible people, he must first see someone who is invisible so that his mind can confirm that he had seen someone invisible, but since he could never see anyone invisible because there wasn't anyone invisible to see, then that one is unaware of his ability to see invisible people; so when he finally has an invisible person to see and he sees it, he doesn't attribute that to the fact that he is able to see invisible people but considers the invisible person to be visible to everyone. But, that still doesn't answer how you are able to see me... or the origin of your gift... mortal. Well, since you seem to have no frickin' clue what I'm even talking about I suppose you won't be of much help, so we better leave it at this. I'll just disregard you as an anomaly and stop concerning myself with it."Cale is also an arrogant jerk. "I understood nothing of what you just said." "Typical mortal..." "Why are you here and what do you know about this place?" "I am here to show my power to the Tchortists. Unlike you, mortals, I can go everywhere I like without being detected by mortal eyes. I am special! With that said, I believe these Tchortists - who seem to love praising powerful entities - should be presented with an invisible man. ME. As soon as I decide to reveal myself they will most certainly praise me and I will be granted entry into this glorious building." "But why Tchortists? Couldn't you find someone else to praise you?" "Filth! I Cale, the Lord of Invisibility - dislike everything Underrail has to offer everything but the Tchort institute... or whatever it is called. This building is worthy of being my residence and so it shall be once Tchortists see the invisible man - ME! They must live in abundance, and I deserve only the best. I hope that answers your question, mortal." "If you call everyone 'mortal,' does that mean that you are immortal?" "But of course - I am special! Do you think this ability that was bestowed upon me would fit a mortal man? Just... wasted once I - Cale, the Lord of Invisibility - perishes? No, that is not how this things work, mortal, and I don't expect you to understand." "How can you be so sure?" He rolls his eyes. "You and your mortal questions. 'How are you so sure?' I am sure because what I possess should not be possessed by a mortal man. And if it is not for mortal men - then I am not mortal. Do you understand?" "But, why exactly shouldn't a mortal man have thepower to be invisible?" "Because mortal people are regular people, common and common men cannot enter the state of gone. I - Cale, the Lord of Invisibility am special, can enter the state of gone, therefore I am not mortal. Simple logic.. mortal. Now stop bothering me with these silly questions." "What do you know about the Tchortists?" "While they are mere mortals, which usually aren't worth my time, these Tchortists seem very religious to me. They praise this Tchort something, and that's all I know about them. Now, once I show them what I - Cale, the Lord of Invisibility - am capable of..." "Invisibility?" "Well, of course. Do I have to explain everything to you... mortals? Where was I... Oh, never mind." "Goodbye, Cale." "Goodbye, mortal." Well that's enough talking to that insufferable jerk. Let's see who else we have here. This guy sounds pretty cheerful. Also clearly a member of Coretech.  "I'm Henrietta and I had some questions for you." He looks at you, waits a couple of seconds, then decides to respond. "I don't care about your name, zoner. As far as those questions of yours are concerned... go bug someone else." "What can you tell me about yourself?" He seems irritated by your question. "Will you leave me alone already? Which part of the 'go bug someone else!' line did you misunderstand? Go - as in, get as far away from me as possible; bug - as in, annoy, rile, bother; someone else - as in, someone that is not me. Get it now?" "What can you tell me about the Tchortists?" His frown becomes even more pronounced. "Deaf, stupid or both? I'd say both. Therefore, I'll have to lower myself to your intellectual level so that I may be able to convey the message that I have been trying to convey for some time now. Here it is... Duh... Duh duh... Duh... Shoo! Don't speak to me... ever again... duh duh... duh!" "Why are you here and what can you tell me about this place?" He spits his words his teeth. "Oh, what kind of a moron are you? Leave me alone or I'll zone you out on the spot!"Okay then... he's also unhinged.  There's a guy called Armored Man who doesn't have anything to say.  And a guy named... What?  "Um... are you okay?" He yells loudly. "WHAT!?" "I asked if you were okay?" "WHAT!?" "Um... can you understand what I'm saying?" "WHAT!?" "I give up... Goodbye." "What!?"Okay I'm beginning to think that the Institute of Tchort largely attracts a certain kind of person.  How about this fellow then...  "Hello. I'm Henrietta and I had some questions, if you have the time." "Nice to meet you, Henrietta. I'm Detritus. I got nothin' better to do anyway. What did you wanna ask?"Well he has an odd name but he seems like a decent enough sort of guy. We could even flirt with him if we wanted to. "What can you tell me about yourself?" At first he seems a bit uneasy about the question, but then decides to answer it. "I, well, I... I'm a simple zoner from Core City who's searching for something better in life. Heard of Drop Zone? I lived there my whole life. Awful place to live in. Awful people, awful food if you can get your hands on some! And in general - it's awful!" "Was there anything good about the Zone for you?" "Family, I suppose, nothing else really comes to mind. But the zone enjoys taking away good things from ya. Plague swept my whole family away. Father, Mother, Grandad. Five sisters and two brothers, all of them older than me. All gone. It is usually easy to lose life in Drop Zone, but that plague... that was pure evil." "Plague?" "Yes, a-- a hardcore plague dominated half the Zone several years ago. Not a lot of folks know about the plague, 'cause no one really cares what happens in the Drop Zone. But us zoners - we care. I care. pipeworkin' plague." "You are lucky to be alive." "Very lucky. And it's exactly that - luck, 'cause I don't have an explanation why death decided to spare me. I mean, live never been ill in my whole life. Ever. No colds, let alone somethin' more serious."This is an interesting point about Detritus and one that will play an important role in a quest down the track. "That's interesting. Maybe you were imnune to the plague somehow. Have you ever been to a doctor?" He bursts out laughing. "Doctor? No... I'm a zoner, remember? Bah, you don't understand it. You come from a different world, you. It's all just luck. Everythint in life is about having luck, that's what I learned. You can be good at something, sure, but if you are unlucky, then that's that. Nothing helps. Look at my hands. I've been workin' like a slave my whole life and... everythin' I've earned can easily be chucked down Pipeworks. It's miserable. I was lucky enough to survive the plague, but unlucky with everythin' else." He shrugs, drifting off for a mornent. After taking a deep breath, he continues. "Anyway, enough of that. Got any more questions?" "Why are you here and what do you know about this place?" "This is the Institute of Tchort. The place where Tchortists live and... do whatever they do. I went to one of their lectures in Core City; it sounded hardcore even though I didn't understand half of it. Any way you look at it, it seems a lot better than the Zone..." He looks at you after a brief pause. "So I came here to try my luck, yeah. Maybe there's a better life waitin' for me behind that heavy gate. For more details about Tchortists, better ask some of the smarter people 'round here. I'm sure they'll be able to explain it better than I can."The institute are going to be very interested in Detritus and we're going to help them be interested in Detritus. "What do you know about Tchortists?" "Tchortists might look like a religious cult, but they are all about science. Now, I'm not a knowledgeable fellow, so a lot of the hardcore science stuff is beyond me. But the core idea is that we're all somehow connected t this Tchort creature. It has similar DNA to us and it can do some amazin' stuff, like regenerate and live forever, adapt to anythin'... somethin' like that. What's most hardcore is that they, Tchortists, want to use the knowledge gained from Tchort to improve us, I mean, allow us to one day go to the Surface and survive there! I definitely prefer that to rottin' in that stinky Drop Zone."Much like Jesus or other major religious figures. "Who's the derailed geezer outside?" "Oh... ignore that stinker. He ain't right in the head. He walks around and scares people with his filthy gaping mouth. The only thing he ever says is 'what?'... Just that and nothin' else. He is not violent, or else he would have had his innards splattered all over the floor by rassophores by now." "Rassophores?" "That is how the Tchortist soldiers are called, if I understood it correctly. I'm guessin' the word has some hardcore meaning or somethin', 'cause it sounds really weird to my ears. Just stay out of their way and you're good."I believe Rassophores are a rank in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Referring to them earning a robe wearing rank or something like that. "Goodbye, Detritus."  That's about all we can do here for now. The doors of the university are shut to us and there isn't anyone to talk to about entering there, yet. And like all major central religious institutions, the Tchortists have a barricade with heavily armed guards at the front and security cameras. Because this is NOT a cult! Next time we'll continue our exploration of Upper Underrail.
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Mar 12, 2023 16:48
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Chapter 48 - Panacea Labs Let's keep exploring some more of the tunnels.    Here we find a small pack of bandits hanging out in front of a hole in a wall.          You may also observe that there are emergency phones around the place here too. They will be important for an upcoming quest.  In a nearby barrel we find our first upper underrail oddity, an Old Metro Ticket.   We won't be exploring this particular location just yet, but it's essentially the largest concentration of Lunatics we can find in the game. So I consider it their home base.  The place itself is actually a shopping mall, another good sign that we're probably not very far from the surface.     East of the mall is an old bathroom looking place. There is more to explore here, but we need to progress the plot first. The extension of this place was added in a later update and provides an alternative entrance into the university, amongst other things. It's also a really dangerous place.   Onwards further east!  We find a guarded blockade of 'Renegades'.  "So, what's going on in there? A private party?" "If I told you, I'd have to kill you. Now turn around and leave." Leave Well that was rude. So this appears to be some place called the Dolos Center. We'll come back here later, probably if we're feeling murderous. The renegades are actually a deserting faction of Protectorate soldiers, you have to come here to either kill them or convince them to return to the protectorate as part of their faction quest line.    Eastwards still we find some more oddities.  Going east as humanly possible we arrive at somewhere important.  This is the rail entrance to the panacea labs. The locations where we will begin our search for information of Witt Nosek.  We narrowly avoid a blob trap. The old laboratory tile set is always a little disorienting for me. I can never seem to spot doorways too well in them. The lack of lighting in this facility doesn't so us too many favors either.  The old labs are usually full of really high quality crafting materials, especially electronics.  This particular labs seems to be inhabited by mutated dogs.     We're kind of having a carrying capacity problem, we'll need to jettison some items at some point to manage that.  We're in the market for a new piece of armor. So I'm thinking we'll make a mutated dog leather overcoat. We'll need some black cloth first though.  We find another new oddity, the Tourist Guide.  We head north into the laboratory proper.   Music - Scientific The lab sections of this game has some good music, very reminiscent of UNATCO HQ from Deus Ex. We find a pile of rubble blocking our way. We'll find a different way around it rather than drawing attention to ourselves with our excavation techniques.   We find a room filled with some toxic gas from some old bio canisters.  We make sure to take some proper precautions.  These places are a good source of toxic sludge if we're interested in making more gas grenades.   The was also another blob trap in back of this place.  At this point I notice that I'm still carrying a regenerative vest around with me. It's pretty crap quality too. But basically if you use this in a tactical vest or riot gear construction, you can make a piece of armor that will help you regenerate health if you power the suit. We strictly wear leather though, so this is actually dead weight for us.   More dogs further in. And there's the sound of chopping coming from deeper within the facility somewhere.       Around the corner we bump into a small community of mutants. They've even caught some fish, although I have no idea from where.           A magnesium grenade make this fight a lot simpler. Not that it would have been super difficult for us.      We find a pair of Amber Stone Earrings in one of the sleeping quarters. Another expensive luxury item.   The chopping sounds get louder and we spot a gun on the ground with a blood smear leading off into a room.  And we find a nice piece of black cloth.  Now we can a slightly improved suit of leather armor. It's got better stealth rating and slightly improved mechanical resistance and really good acid resistance. Although we lose our fire protection.  We find a mentor for thermodynamic destabilization. It's basically a fireball spell.  Behind the medical curtain thing, we find the source of the chopping. There's a mutant hacking away at an old corpse.     In a crate nearby we find a key card to somewhere in this lab.  And some psionic mufflers, these are pretty handy if you're a psionic, you add them to a headband and you're psi powers become much more efficient.  We find a blueprint for a Super Health Hypo. These are basically the best healing item in the game. They are pretty resource expensive to make though.  The main limiting agent for making these will be crawler poison. Although it also requires 3 lots of gyromitrin, and 5 lots of blood, and some fusing enzyme too. Which means we're also going to need to fish up a lot of anglerfish if we want a steady supply of these or otherwise just pay for fusing enzyme from doctors/biologists. It's probably worth doing, although we're going to need to get our biology to 90 first.  A nearby crate also has three different shield modulators of fairly okay quality too.  Exploring around some more, we find that there's Kamikaze bots roaming the place too.  We waste a grenade to get rid of them, I really should reequip my throwing knives for these sorts of fights, or honestly just take the hit since we're tough enough at this stage to handle a few explosions.  They weren't guarding much besides some obsolete oddities at this point.   We eventually find a room that is highly electronically locked. Presumably there's a key card to this door somewhere in here, but we're nearly good to hack pretty much anything at this point.   Behind the door is another kamikaze bot and a plasma walker. We secretly equipped some anti robot utilities during a cheeky reload.   I'm beginning to see the utility in high tier HE grenades. I will need to make note of this for the future.  We find another oddity unique to Upper Underrail, the Empty Cigarette Pack. Lung Cancer cigarettes, surely the denizens of underrail know what these are? They know what cigars are? We'll be meeting a smoking addict in the near future too. Anyway, this room, as well as having two dead bodies in it, also has a functioning computer in it too.  To: Mark Reed; Subject: AliasesMr. Reed, due to recent turmoil within the organization, we decided to, for security reasons, use aliases in all external communication from now on. You'll find that this is in full compliance with the Security Rulebook as well as Local Governance mandate. The aliases for the primary staff are assigned as follows: Gerald Adams Corus Olexiy Macar - Chiron Wit Nosek - Thallo Earl Evans - Minthe Njord Abbot Nessus So Wit Nosek went by the alias, Thallo. Some of these other alias' may come in handy too. We need to know them, or one of them at least. To: Mark Reed; Subject: File transfersMr. Reed, as per your request, we have transferred all the assistant staff files to Core City, though I doubt this will be of any use to you. By this time they could be anywhere and they're no longer worth the resources that would be required to track them down. This is the only hint we're getting on where to go next and it's not much of one at all. Our next target is going to coincide with the main plot so we can put it out of our minds until we stumble into it. Fran: Mark Reed; Subject: Re: File transfersReceived and filed under the following code #41FG998L And this code is also important to know, so we know what to look for at the next location in Core City. To: Mark Reed; Subject: ThalloMr. Reed, I strongly suggest that you act upon what we discussed in person last week. Thallo is acting weirder with every passing day and I fear there might be something wrong with him psychologically. He's now conducting research exclusively on his own, refusing to cooperate with his colleagues. He hasn't written a report in days now and openly admits that he will not share his knowledge with anyone. He also seems very irritated by the absence of his assistant. Seems like Witt was starting to lose the plot towards the end. Or had a change of heart maybe? Hard to say, but it doesn't look like the research being done here was the most ethical of sorts. Exit One of the bodies in the room has a unique pistol on them. It also seems to strongly suggest that the scientists committed suicide here for some reason. Maybe they got trapped in by the mutants?  And there's another key card to god knows where.  At the very end of this hallway is a locked, observation room.  Inside is a dead scientist that is really annoyingly placed. Every time you try and click on his body you're going to close the door to the room instead.  He had some crawler poison on their person at least. That'll go towards making some super stims I guess.  And that was the Panacea labs. That's all we came up to Upper Underrail for, but we'll finish exploring the main area before we head back down.     Roughly south of the labs, we find a group of scavengers, their yellow health bars indicate they're a bit wary of us.  Before we go say hi, we'll check out opposite platform.   Mostly just junk.  The scavengers really don't want explore the connecting passage between the platform for some reason. We may ignore their request at a future date and see what's up with that.  Once we get close enough to the main group, one of them strikes up a conversation.  "Don't worry, I wasn't planning on going down there" "Good..."They aren't very forthcoming with new info though.  Towards the back is a merchant of theirs, Marty.  "Show me what you got, Marty." I forgot to question him but nobody here says all that much anyway. This station was for some kind of education/research place called the Eos complex, but we won't be learning more than that. At any rate, Marty sells assorted crafting junk.  He buys the ton of ammo we've been lugging about for a while now. We sell him way more than is profitable but we need to the extra carrying capacity more than we need the money.  There is one another notable location in this place however.    There's a ladder in a back room here.  Climbing down into it, we find that we're actually inside of a gigantic tower called the Utility tower.  This play may well actually jut out into the surface world. It's hard to tell. But we'll come back here when we're a bit more prepared. This place is essentially a challenge dungeon. It's a large number of floors tall and you can't ever reach the very top of the place unless you play the game DOMINATING difficulty either.  The key gimmick to this place is that its very very cold. The longer we hang out in here the colder it gets. The higher we climb the harder it becomes to resist the cold. This is basically the only place in the game where cold resistance is really important or indeed actually useful. So we're going to want to get our hands on some high cold resistance gear before we go in here. We're also going to want to bring as much coal as we can with us too, as this is the place where coal comes in handy too. A lot of incendiary explosives would go amiss either, since the flames they produce can keep us warm. Also canned fish, as it protects you from cold is a good idea too.   Another small bandit encampment. They're always fine with you wandering about so long as you don't get too close to them.    Not that their a threat to us at all.  South of the encampment we run into another beggar. We give her some charity and move on.  She also has a pet dog with her too, which is named. Although I forget what it was called.  Further south takes us back to core city. So we'll head more easterly.      Up in the north eastern most area of upper underrail is yet another bandit camp.     And they're guarding cigarettes.  This is as far in this direction as we'll ever go, we obey the signs.  We've been picking up a lot of fuel, so we'll make a some more molotov's. The crafting system in this game is somewhat reminding me of Arcanum's, and is defintely an improvement on that if it is. Mainly because you can actually find ingredients to make things relatively easily. Like the schematic to make Lemon & Potato batteries in that game was clearly there to be a cheaper/easier alternative to making electricity ammo than the old electrolyte solution and metal plates. But they forgot to add in lemons and potatoes in all but a few select places. That sort of oversight was a big issue with tech builds in Arcanum. Anyway...   There's a few more bandits back here yet.    There's even a boss bandit called Gubbins.  He's no pushover either.  But still no match for the Invictus!   His armored pal isn't getting up with our attack gains either.   Gubbins has a really nice sounding sledgehammer on him called Quake. It causing shockwave damage to nearby enemies and potentially dazes them. That's seems pretty drat good. I believe it also has the symbol for the game Quake on the side of it.   Apart from the occasional oddity, there's not much else back here. The vents don't go anywhere either.    Heading south we find a trap door we can't enter. This is apart of another Protectorate quest that would involve us killing some Free Drones living down there. I don't believe we ever actually hang out with them as Free Drones ourselves. Since we're in a different cell and all.    The tunnels at this station lead to a full area transition for whatever reason.   There's also another door to the drones base down there too.    More bandits.     More corpses.   And we've stumbled upon Fort Appogee.  "What is this place?" "This is Fort Apogee, citizen, the headquarters of all Underrail Protectorate operations in South Underrail, aswell as the location of the United Stations consulate." "What's the purpose of the consulate?" "Are you in need of Underrail Protectorate's protection?The consulate offers protection to all citizens of United Stations members. You would have to show me your papers, though." "Is South Gate Station a member of the UnitedStations?" "I'm afraid not." "Sorry, I took a wrong turn. Goodbye." So this is the Protectorates main base of operations in South Underrail. We'd be spending a lot time here if we had joined the Protectorate.  As previously mentioned they have one of the best stores in the game.  Although much like the embassy, they require you to holster your weapons when walking about many places in there which is annoying.  The protectorate also have access to mechs. We won't be fighting many of these bad boys, but they will be a pain in the arse for us to fight. Mostly they're used by the protectorate to excavate cave systems. If we'd joined them, there is even a mission where we'd get to pilot one of these, and they're every bit as powerful as they look. The other thing to note about fort apogee is that their courtyard is one of the places people love to show off their powerful builds in. There's a ton of soldiers all about the place and mechs too. And there's many a youtube video of people showing off their fantastic builds just utterly trivialising the place on DOMINATING. Simply beautiful.  Now we just have to check out the south western part of the this are and we're done.   There is one last incidental place we can see if we swing north.    This place is a research facility occupied by the protectorate. We'll need to come here later for Free Drones type business. We'd be going here if we'd joined the cans too.   There's a suspicious door along the tracks nearby.        The bandits precious oddities give us the boost we need to level up once more.   And now we're at level 20. This is max level for the base game. We did it folks. But now we've got another 10 more to go for the DLC. We're going to need them.  It's dexterity all the way forwards for us.  We also take Fatal Throw, which will allow us to both critical hit any enemy with less than 25% health and refund AP if we kill them with it too. This will obviously have its utilities.  We keep our various Tech skills nice and high.  We keep boosting those stun skills.    We stumble upon a trap door just out in the open.   There's a handful of lunatics down here.      The psychopath is the deadliest one down here as he can stun us with his thought control powers easily.     Otherwise, we find a really nice power core down here.    And that's that taken care of.   More bandits.    Our final pack of cigarettes.    Behind these crates is a trapdoor, but we aren't perceptive enough to see it. We'll have to use it as an exit instead.   This turn off is the last place of interest we'll explore.  It's got some more heavily entrenched lunatics in it.                         And there's the exit to the trapdoor. Great!  Welp that was basically all of Upper Underrail. Obviously there's more see there but only to explore places we've already found in greater detail.   We finally ditch a huge pile of junk we've been carrying this whole time and sell off a few things.  We build up the nerve to break into the back of Moe's and see what's back here.  Not a whole lot, that's for sure.  Anyway, we're ready to go look for Phreak and that's gonna require magic. So we return to only all inclusive wizard school we know of.  Say what you will about Sergio's arcane practices, he ain't no terf. "Right, I'd like to try this Motion thing." "That'll be ninety charons." "Here you go." Give him 90 stygian coins. "Good. Let's get you in Motion, cat!" He points to the shisha. Draw a smoke... Smoke shisha. We feel arcane power, rushing through our very being!           So we are now in Motion. The screen is going to flash random colours for 15 mins and games music is going to keep slowing down and speeding up.  We're also dumber, blinder and more attuned to our innate psi abilities, but in a crap way where our stats are cooked and resolve is now 100% worse.  So one of the secret ways to find Phreak involves getting motion about 5 times. Each time we'll have a random event happen to us. The Fifth one will lead us to an area where we can find Phreak.  Since I'd never really done this before, I didn't realize that you had to wait 15 mins between motion sessions. So in interest of saving time, I will just forgo our arcane training and the nominal fees it costs and just find him the old fashioned way.  Just as well, since taking Motion can and will permanent damage your brain, and then we would have our intelligence two points lower. Although there might be a way to treat that in Junk Yard now. But intelligence loss is a big deal as, unlike many other stats, there are not very many ways to positively boost it in the game. In fact there is essentially only one way to boost it as we will eventually find.  Anyway there are two other ways to find Phreak. We can have an insanely high Perception skill, like either 14 or 11 depending on where you're looking for him, or you can just get yourself a pair of NVG's.  If you come to the weird reactor pool location in Core City and switch them on. You can find a hidden passage.  A passage that anyone should be able to squeeze into.  And this takes us inside an old power station, secreted away inside pipes of Core City.  And it's somewhere in here that we will find Phreak.
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Mar 13, 2023 10:36
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The Empty Cigarette Pack oddity just sounds like Australian (And I think a few EU country) packets.
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Mar 13, 2023 13:50
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Apologies for the delay in updates, assignments are starting to pile up and I've remarkably little time to do them during the working part of the week. Hopefully I will be more free next weekend.
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Mar 18, 2023 05:36
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Take all the time you need!
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Mar 18, 2023 06:46
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Chapter 49 - A Crunch for a Crunch Well as it turns out grad school is quite a time sink if you take it seriously. Anyway, I have a short break between now and next semester so let's see how far we can get until then. When we last left off, Henrietta had forgone taking recreational drugs and instead stumbled upon the guts of a forgotten power plant in the middle of Core City. She was on the trail of the elusive hacker named Phreak and that trail is nearing its end.  So I'm a little rusty after that months long hiatus, but I still have a good idea what we're doing. This first area of the power plant has this network of cat walks with various switches over a large pool of water. As you may well surmise, this is puzzle, although one we can't do just yet. So we'll ignore it for now.  This are is long abandoned and full of small rooms filled with all sorts of mostly electronically themed junk.  Like a lot of areas added in post DLC, its generally very high quality junk too. Although largely nothing we really care about. Of course I might be forgetting some future crafting projects I initially had in mind, but we can always come back for this stuff if we need to.  High quality tungsten spikes for instance, might well make a nice set of combat gloves one day... hmm.  Among other things, this place has a lot of hard to see metal door ways, at least they don't require a perception check, although maybe some of them do...  But as I said, most of this place is just side areas with high quality crap in it.  A nice plasma core is always a good find.  We may as some point wish to make a psi headband with something like this on it, a filter which improves specific psi skills. Although Temporal Distortion is the offensive Temporal Manipulation ability. We're not really specced for it.   In the far west is the entrance to deeper into the power plant.  North of that entrance is another hard to notice door.  This room had a few dexterity skill checks. With Dex as our best skill, we are easily able to reach down into the cracks in gratings.  It just gives us a few random pieces of junk and some high quality shield parts. Not terrible.  A second crack gives us more junk and an advanced electronic repair kit. Nice, those are always handy to have around.  The rest of this area is just more junk.  So deeper into the power plant we go.  And we find the characteristic cobwebs of a coil spider infestation. The critters we first faced on one of the Gauntlet floors. Figures, you almost always find these buggers in areas where there's high voltages about. It's important to keep our wits about us as they tend to have web traps that stun and entangle you laying about the place.  Most of the coil spiders are paired up around here. One greater coil spider and one regular.  They all die just as easily to Henrietta's diseased fists of fury.  Although the greater variants take more of a beating. They're attacks are generally worse too as they'll hit a lot harder, stun you, and drain your energy reserves as well. They're a lot more perceptive and therefore you need a lot of skill to be able to sneak up on them. But we've got that covered at least.  My initial rustiness leads me to get zapped, so these buggers get a few rounds to electrocute us.  We manage to survive, although I failed to notice that as well as my shield getting drained, they also drained my taser too. Hopefully I remember to charge it at some point.    Once the stun wears off, we're more than speedy enough to mop us the rest of them.   And we manage to collect our first coil spider oddity, the Coil Spider Egg Sack. Eggy.  The trick to this place is that there are a number of doors scattered about which are sealed and cannot be opened. We need to figure out a way to do just that.   But first we need to wander into some webs first.  Up ahead is some stairs leading up.  That arching power thing next to the stairs is the key to opening the doors. But we'll investigate that in a bit.  Upstairs is much of the same.   This particular door with the high voltage sign out the front of it is the one we really want to open above all the others.  But we'll clear out the area first.        And there's the last coil spider oddity. That was easy at least.   Alrighty, with those spiders out of the way we can start flipping switches. There's a few of them located on both the upper and lower levels of this place. You turn them on, and they start to a countdown. When the countdown reaches 0...  The power switch discharges an EMP shock wave which will hurt you and drain your batteries. Annoying. Anyway these are linked to doors throughout the complex. I'm not sure if it's random or what, but I believe all the switches on the top floor open doors on the lower level at least.  Hitting the switches also seems to spawn new coil spiders. So we'll need to clear out both floors yet again. I think if you methodically clear out each floor and then start with the top switches and work your way down to the bottom switches you can at least save yourself the hassle of fighting the coil spiders all at once. But I might be wrong about that.   Hitting more switches and we start to see some doors opening before us.  They all contain more valuable garbage.       The one had an incendiary collector inside of it, which is need to turn a chemical blob pistol into a fiery version of itself. Handy if you're a pistols guy. Pistol build's definitely get the widest variety of elemental damage for sure.    With all the switches flipped its back upstairs for us.  And of course we get yet another round of coil spiders to clear up.   This room weirdly has two doors, one which I think can only be opened from the inside, not that is really matters.  Oh well it had a gold ring in it at least, we could always use the charons from that for some expensive future projects.  We also find a relatively decent piece of armor. I mean not for us really, it's antithermic so it'll tank our stealth skill, plus it's got a huge armor penalty which is no good for us either. If we were the more medium armored inclined it wouldn't be too bad, especially we had the disassemble feat that lets you recover crafting components with a small penalty to the item quality if you do. Anti-rifle material is amazing, it gives you a 200% increase to bullets and shotgun shells. This will utterly neuter a lot of combat encounters as most bullets will just ping off of you doing no damage what so ever. Definitely my armor of choice with an assault rifle build.    We're just about out of places to clear, this last room has some decent shield part, if we felt the desire to make a high frequency shield. Could save us from a sniper or two one day.  With, that we can finally explore the high voltage room. Seems fairly samey at the moment.  At the very back of it is yet another hard to see door that is made even harder to see by the fact that its hidden behind a nearby shelf.  The room adjacent to it has a ladder which will return us to a different part of Core City. If we had absurdly high perception skill we could have skipped the entire spiders nest and just entered the plant through here. Alas.  Going into the door by the shelves we find a not so unoccupied workshop.  And there inside is an elusive old man.  Despite all that, an old vigorous man swiftly steps up before you. Unaffected by his surroundings, he seems primed to face an intruder. What stands apart from the usual decrepit mugger look, is his clenched right fist, or rather, the glove he's wearing. From the joints of each of his fingers, five wires extend over his upper arm into the sleeve of his coat. At the center of his palm, a source of blue light glows bright. And yes, as I mentioned that Phreak whose actual name is Mitt Draper in this game, is clearly based on the real life phone phreaker, John Draper AKA Captain Crunch. He certainly looks a lot like him. The Mitt is probably from Kevin Mitnick another famous hacker who as I understand it is an annoying cyber security person these days or something. Incidentally, I'm very half tempted to kill Phreak after we're done dealing with him, he's got a really nice unique weapon on his person that will suit our needs nicely.   This Energy Siphon ability would be amazing to use against robots. Given robots are our biggest weak spot, and a weak spot that's going to become a serious problem if we don't find more ways to cover it... We will have to consider this.  "Hmm... would you look at that, another stray cockroach took a wrong turn. Some... disinsection might be in order."His voice sounds familiar to you. Without a shadow of a doubt, you've heard him talk over one of the emergency phones. You recall hearing him speak on a phone south of Warehouse Block Beta, north of GMS compound and near the Ironhead's base. Listening in on a confrontative conversation, you managed to barely hear him say that he's not willing to do 'crunching' anymore.. We've got to be careful what we say to him. Not that we're in any danger, but Phreak's got some goody's for us if he likes us. Since we have no persuasion skill, that means we'll have to be extra careful and impress him with out resourcefulness instead. "I'm looking for someone who goes by many names, one of which is Phreak." The words you've said invoke no reaction from him. However, it takes him a few seconds to respond. "You'd need to learn to buzz the dead before that can happen. He makes a few steps towards you as he looks around."Of course we know he's bluffing. "I'm fairly certain that the man I'm looking for is standing right in front of me." He slowly crosses his arms as he improves his posture; his fingers dancing impatiently on his front deltoids. "And by which means did you arrive to that conclusion?" "This is something I've deducted after a longinvestigation." "How so? Give me something concrete." "I've heard you talk over the emergency phones located near the railroads..." Explain what you've learned so far about these abandoned devices.Although I'm not 100% sure how on earth we're ever supposed to tie this investigation to him being in here, this extremely well hidden power station that requires some very specific skill checks or you stumbling around with some fast draining NVG's on in a well lit area. I'm pretty sure at most we can ever surmise is that he's probably still somewhere in Core City. It's not the most graceful of inserted content to be sure. The relative secrecy of these obsoleted devices would make you think that right now, they're exclusively used to organize suspicious activities. Their proximity to some of the most infamous gangs, further support this notion. Your presentation manages to keep his attention all throughout, and at the end he gives you a slight nod of approval. "That brings us to here..." He starts tinkering with his right glove. In doing so, it would seem he's taking care of something you've mentioned just earlier. "Listen here, I'll keep it coin-twenty with you. Most of my wires are running thin, some of which are close to frying me whole. You being here, yet another loose cable, are slicing my options into the final two: either prove your metal with me, or I'll have to make sure you've never seen me.Yeah so Phreak has some pretty confusing lingo about him. I have no idea what he means by coin 20 or whatever, but I think he likes you more if you don't ask too many obvious questions and stick to business. At least for now. "Alright, we can work together." "Hmm... that eager to just tag along with a stranger? You don't find anything abnormal about that?" "I fear nothing. In fact, the mystery of our encounter makes it all that much more interesting." "A younger self would probably say the same, hmph. But I've outgrown that, or perhaps, became too old to even enjoy such gigs." He looks away. "It is what it is... Now, let's continue where we've left off." "Listen closely, this gig is a long one." He looks down, indirectly pointing you at his hands which he uses to gesture in over abundance. His fingers form various geometric shapes as he proceeds to explain further. "Behind me is one of the access points to the Core City power grid. I'll get back to that crunch much later. Right now however, I'm kicked out of areas where I've left behind some gizmos needed to jack up the big one, okay?" He points at the power grid next to him, making circlers in the process as if he's imaging that something's missing there. "Okay. Go on." "Whenever I dig up these kinds of holes, I set up shop. There're many more rooms like this around the city and beyond, out of which, I was kicked out quite... hardcore. One particular hideout I have in mind is located in the sewers, all the way to the northwest." He gently points at you. "Now, this is where you hop in. " "I'm listening." "A bunch of gizmos, calling themselves the Acid Hunters, became the bane of my main crunch I've had in mind for this... place." He readjusts his glasses. "See, I've been crunching with everyone who found out about my gig, crunch for a crunch kind of schemes. I'll keep it coin-hundred with you, that gig I did with this group in particular, well... it failed miserably and now they're back after me, or something like that. All I know is that they're armed and well barricaded in that sewer cave of mine. I'd lame them out as usual but I've left down there a crucial gizmo I'll need to carry on with my crunch here - a bunch of thick high voltage power cables." By grabbing his wrist, he gestures to you the width of the cables, which would make them wide as an forearm. "Deal with any gizmos in your way, and bring me back the heavies."Oh hey, we've been looking all over for those dickheads. That's a nice coincidence. They're the one who likely sole the macguffin that the faceless were after and also likely killed Terry and Lora Baker of SGS. So we definitely want to go after them. "What will I get from this task?" "Hmm, something I'm sure you'll find good use of. It's a piece of a much greater puzzle." Out of a sudden, he snaps his fingers. The fabric of his glove combined with his technique, produces a loud, hair-raising sound. "A gizmo, that can blindside all metal eyes. Let's just keep it at that, for now."Sounds interesting, we'll probably be wanting whatever that is. So we're totally in. "Acid Hunters? live been looking for that gang all over the place." "Well, there you go. Another reason to do the crunch." "Have you noticed anything suspicious about them?" "Not really sure what you're looking for? One would say that pretty much everything is strange about that hellish bunch." "Were they carrying something that doesn't belong to them?" "Here, I'll break it down for you... Some time ago, before they decided to come back to my hideout, they've brought to me a big gizmo for sale. As arrogant as usual, especially this guy, Cornell, their big boss, would begin to boast about it as if it was the best gizmo ever. I'd disregard that lie with no second thought, but they went out of their way to prove me otherwise by opening the box for me to see the gig." He takes off his glasses for a moment to wipe his eyes. "For once, they were right. Just looking at it gave me a headache as it appeared both distorted and smooth. A mind bending shape, coupled with markings none of which I could discern. I--" He looks away for a moment. "--I just can't put it into words. Even if I were to sell my kidney I'd never amass the amount they've asked for. But I couldn't just let them take it away from me. In that moment I had a metal tracker on me which I've planted on the box, before I've booted them out. They took the drat gizmo all over the place, until it ended up somewhere I couldn't keep a track of - The Coretech Research Facility. I've never had access to any of the shacks held by the fat rats. But I don't intend to keep it that way for too long."Yep they've definitely got what we're looking for for certain and it seems to be in the hands of Coretech now apparently. "Tell me more about the strange object they'vepresented to you." "Since I can't really describe it any more than I already have, think of it like this: imagine a gizmo that'd make you both fearful and attractive to it. Couple that with whatever unknown origin it could come from, add hundred more questions about what you've seen, and bam there you have it."So it's a Macguffin. Got it. "That's some food for thought. Where do we go from here?" "The all so innocent intranets and their many metal eyes attached to it. That, and a little something which draws the attention of said gizmos, confuses them and makes them blind to the actual reality... But let's not waste any moretime on this..." "Point me where to go." "First up, I'll pop open a trap door on the floor below, it'll get you faster to where you're supposed to crunch." He presses some buttons on his glove, the light coming out of his palm flickers for a while. "Look for a hidden lever inside the second shaft of this... what do you call it... it's like a huge canalization pass or something. You'll find it all the way northwest deep inside the city sewers. It's a really big pipe, you can't miss it. Bring me the cables and deal with the Acid Hunters in any way you... you do your gig... And yeah, I am Phreak as you correctly surmised. That's the way all gizmos in and out of our gig know me by." "Wait a minute, when I asked you about that name you've told me that he's dead?" "Was I supposed to spill my guts out for you? Don't take it that serious; twas nothing but basic measures of precaution."Probably a stupid question, but it's not hurt our rep with Phreak at all I don't think. "I get it. Okay, to sewers I go." He waves you off and goes back to his work. Well then, we've got a little bit of main plot to further it seems whilst we're busy tying up some other loose ends.   The trap door is all the way in the back here.  And it plops us right out into the core city sewers again. There's a few more things we'll probably want to do down here, but for now we'll just head north.   Incidentally, the pool and the very end of this place is the only location in the while game (except maybe some very late game area) where you can catch the ghostface jellyfish, needed to complete the fishing quest. Given that its still a pretty rare catch at that, and the very limited lack of information on where to catch it, I've no idea how you're supposed to stumble into this fact. At any rate I'm very glad we got lucky and Al Fabet just happened to be selling one for us. Anywho, we'll try exploring some of this hatchways.  They're all very dark and most are just dead ends.  We'll want to put on our NVG's for this.  Much better. So this is the completely wrong hatch, but we'll poke about anyway.  Yup this one is infested with crawlers.  Three to be exact, two normals and a deathstalker.  I got really luckly with this and got the drop on all three, and in one turn managed to pin the deathstalker with a net and kill the other two.  The second died to a massive crit on my last possible turn too.  And then the deathstalker went down like a chump. Henrietta is definitely gotten incredibly strong. Crawlers as just another nuisance to here.  We got lucky stumbling down here at least. We found a pretty rare oddity, the Three-Eyed Skull. No idea if this is a reference to something, but I'll take the 3 xp for sure.  Anyway, that hatchway wraps around to another hatch. The rest likely just lead to small pools with siphoner ambushes in them. One of them however.  Takes us to a dark room with a hidden switch. I think we need to know about this switch to find it.  Pulling the switch reveals a secret passage, inside of which is our quarry.   There's three of them and they've placed a few acid blob traps at the doorway. We've tracked down the Acid Hunters.  "Name's Henrietta. I've been looking for you high and low, Cornell."I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but the only other way to find these guys is to work for the Oligarchs, which prevents you from ever finding Phreak. If we were to stumble on his lair, Phreak wouldn't be there and all we would find is his old laptop.  "Hey now, I ain't got nothin' to do with that boy's death. If it's revenge they want, they oughta send their assassins to Coretech."Now we have no idea what Cornell is talking about, but he clearly doesn't know that, so let's probe him for info on this. "Tell me how the boy died." He takes a deep breath. "Alright, listen...So, I had this little piece of old world tech or somethin'. Some kinda Cube thingy. Don't know what it did but it looked right fancy. Tried floggin' it to a couple of merchants along the way to Core City, but they all turned out to be cheapskates. So, when I got back home I got in contact with the Oligarch kids. I figured - they got quite a bit of disposable income, and they might appreciate somethin' new to spend it on. Right I was. Too drat right... We met in an alley near the Drop Zone, ya know - a nice, secluded place where no one can interrupt us. Miland Simmons wanted it the most, but Edmund, Knight's kid, kept outbiddin' him. Honestly, I don't think Edmund even wanted the thing, he just wanted to piss Miland off, or prove that he had more money. Or, maybe to impress Edstrom's girl... what's-her-face... umm... never mind, but she was there as well. Three stupid rich brats squabblin' over a toy. You can see where this is goin'. Eventually, the two boys got into a fight, when Miland suddenly pulled out a gun. I think he only wanted to strike Ed with the butt of it, but Ed got a hold of his hand and they wrestled. The gun went off... Bang! And that was the end of Edmund Knight - he got dominated. We all panicked. Miland swore it was an accident and persuaded the girl to keep her mouth shut. So, we made the trade with Miland and took off. Got the hell outta there. And now... now we're here."I believe Edmund Knight is the son of the head of Praetorian Security. If we'd join them, there'd be a quest that would end up with us tracking Cornell down about it. I believe the other oligarchs have a similar quest revolving around this murder to and its the impetus for the Oligarch quests to railroad you back into the main plot somewhat. "I had some questions about Terry and Lora Baker, merchants from South Gate Station." "I'm-- Wait, uh, I still don't understand who yer talkin' about or what the hell does it all gotta do with me... us... me?" "I found Terry's body in a cave near Rail Crossing. It seems to me that he was killed with a chemical weapon - similar to what you goons have in your arsenal." "So what? Just 'cause we got some melters doesn't mean we zoned out your buddy? Get outta here! I got nothin' more to say to ya, 'cause I ain't got a clue what yer talkin' about. And I think you ain't got no clue either..."So we don't have the intimidation skill to get Cornell to admit to what happened, or to get an idea on exactly what happened there, but he's definitely responsible for their deaths. "Why did you stick around in Core City after what happened?" "We intended to hide till this thing with the Tunnelers blew over and then head north. Don't think we'll be safe anywhere till then, since they seem to be lookin' for us as well, Tunnelers, Faceless, whatever ya wanna call 'em." "Why are the Faceless lookin for you?" "'Cause of that stupid Cube, why else?" "Tell me about the Cube." "I wish we never found the drat thing. We got it off some trade caravan in the middle of Lower Underrail. It was mostly slim pickings, but this thingy... this thingy looked expensive. Had its own fancy box and everythin'. So, we took it from one merchant to the other for appraisal on our way here, but the cheapskates didn't want to pay enough for it since they couldn't figure out what it actually did. I think it's pretty valuable, though, 'cause I believe it's what brought the Tunnelers to the gates of Core City. And I hear they also paid visits to other places we've been to since we got this pipeworkin' thing."Weirdly he doesn't mention what actually happened to the cube, since he clearly doesn't happen anymore. Luckily, as Phreak mentioned, there's a tracking device on it so we'll be able to locate it soon enough. "Ever heard of Phreak?" "Phreak?" He purses his lips and frowns. "I see. So he's the one who ratted us out. Figures..." "Phreak's got some equipment here I'm interested in." He hesistates at first but then speaks. "We did some crunchin' together. This is his joint. Knowin' he's hardcore at keepin' himself outta sight, this is where we intended to hide." "Time to settle this thing, I guess." "So, what's it gonna be?"Well, we're not the diplomatic sort and at any rate we've got to avenge Terry and Lora too, so the acid hunters are not coming out of this alive. "I'm afraid you have to die." "We'll see about that, pipeworker. Acid Hunters, burn her up!" Fight! Now normally I don't even bother chatting to these pipe workers, since it gives them the opportunity to attack first and they're nasty if you haven't got a good deal of acid protection. I don't think our dog leather overcoat would be sufficient enough to deal with them. But that doesn't matter, because we won the initiative check!  We open with a hand grenade. It nearly kills one of them and mildly perturbs the other two.  Cornell is tough, but the more we hit someone, the more our hits hurt.  He succumbs soon after.  The badly wounded good is dropped in one punch.  And we manage to stun the last guy before he gets a chance to move.  And he dies shortly into turn two of the fight.  And that was the Acid Hunters. We'll keep Cornell's Head, as we need it for a future quest.  We'll grab his advanced Catalyzing belt, a fantastic belt if you're running a chemical weapons build. For us, it's merely worth a lot of money.  I'm half tempted to grab his acid blob pistol too. They're honestly pretty good, especially because they're a good source of non-physical damage. But we're not really that good with pistols, so we'll hold off on it.  There's also an obsolete oddity in the back here too.  Apart from that there's an unlit fireplace in the back, which might well reveal some secrets if we lit it, but I didn't have any coal on me. But we do find the HV Power Cables that Phreak we after, so we nab them.  And with that we quickly hurry back to Phreak.  "I've brought the cables you were looking for." Give him the cables. "Ah, there they are..." He briefly inspects the wires before laying them down on the floor nearby. Without hesitation he takes one end of the cables and plugs them into the power grid next to him. "What have you done with the Acid Hunters?" "They will no longer bother you or anyone else for that matter." "Hardcore, just the way I like it." He smiles. "Nobody will shed a tear for those gizmos." He faces away from you for a moment and out of his coat, produces a strange device. With great speed he connects several of its components after which, he approaches you. "This is what I've had in mind for you." He lifts up the object. "Point it at the metal eyes, and watch them squint as they struggle to detect anyone or anything." Whenever the fingertips of his glove would make contact with the gadget, they'd produce a static sound few could stand idle while listening. "This is it - a crunch for a crunch. Now take it." He hands you over the device.In case it isn't obvious, the first reward that Phreak gives us, assuming he likes us, is something that we can use to temporarily scramble security cameras. I believe the duration of the scramble scales with your hacking and or electronics skill. It's marginally useful, a little annoying too as I believe you use it on friendly cameras the cameras will treat you as hostile if you they spot you later. But it may still have some practical use a little further down the line. "Thank you." "That marks only the beginning of what I've had in mind. Now you'll endure some leg stretching for me." He chuckles. "Add to that some potential hot steam... and just as many ear piercing sounds." He giggles. "Hmm, how does some more crunching sound to you?"Crunch Away. "I'll hear you out first." "Okay, you've been to one of my hideouts, well two if you count this one. Now how about we double that? In order to make that the case, in addition to some gizmos along the way, these shelters aren't as accessible as the previous ones. They're locked, and only I know the way in. How hard can it be to unlock a keypad? Well when you name it like that, it might sound much easier than it actually is. He reaches for his pockets and pulls out a tiny device. It has small buttons and an old fashioned speaker. You can see his fingers hitting the keys but nothing comes out. "This is an Orange box. A playgizmo the likes of which you won't find anywhere around here. Especially this kind of rigged gig which now acts as a lockpick tool for special kind of lock pads that I've also... cracked. As the color might already suggest, but here, I'm talking about the emergency phones, specifically those of Upper Underrail. Each and every phone is beyond spoofed, and now they function as a system through which I control the access of their nearby service rooms."Not a Half-Life reference I don't think. The Orange box is instead referring to two different devices created by phone phreaks back in the glory days of such things. The red box and blue box. They were basically gadgets that could allow someone to hijack phone lines and avoid needing to pay to use payphones and what have you. Pretty ingenious little things. I'm following, go on. "Listen, you'll be heading to Upper Underraill Metro. Two emergency phones lead to my hideouts. First one is located south of Institute of Tchort, and the second one is north of Fort Apogee. Both shacks are relatively compromised, just like the one you've already been to. You may find some gizmos in their relative proximity, but surely they have some different intentions in mind, rather than to just try to extort me or something. The Orange Box has seven buttons of which six are used to input sounds and the last one to repeat the required sequence. The gizmo is primitive, it has no ability to preview the current inserted sequence in any way, but it will remember it until it reaches its maximum length. At that point consider the sequence inserted and evaluated. There's a tiny light I've added to the box that displays the current sequence. First sequence is red, the second is green and the final one is blue. If all three are matching, the light will become white for a while before it shuts itself off. The box also has a connector, suited to fit the ones over at each and every emergency phone in the Upper Underrail Metro. Once it's connected, in order to unlock the key pad, the user has to match three, multi-input sequences in a row without a mistake. The length of the sequence may vary, and can only be heard, not seen. If a mistake is made at any point, the entire sequence goes back to start, once again requiring three full successful sequences to be inserted in a row. If at any point you disconnect the box, once you plug it back in again, the sequence will start all over. Every button on the box, corresponds to the ones on the phone. Listen to the sounds of each dial options on the emergency phone, and remember them well. The sequence can be repeated any amount of times without any risk. However, the reproduced sound may have some... interference, due to the imperfect implementation. Don't rely on the rhythm of the sequence, instead focus closely on the sounds themselves. That's it for gaining the access to the hideouts. Once there I'll need you to pick me up two more gizmos so that I can continue my gig over here." He points at the power grid next to him. "First is the High Voltage Penetrator Core, and the second one is a customized remote controller. They should be easy enough to find once you're in. Are there any questions?"Anyway in case you haven't guessed, this is going to involve a sound based Simon like puzzle. It's pretty painful, espeically if you're character hasn't got high perception. But it's doable, unless you're tone deaf of course. "How long are the sound sequences?" "Shouldn't be shorter than five sounds, nor longer than ten. They'll most likely increase in length, once you go through each of them. You must complete three sequences in a row in order to gain the access to the hideouts. There's a tiny light I've added to the box that displays the current sequence. First sequence is red, the second is green and the final one is blue. If all three are matching, the light will become white for a while before it shuts itself off." "So I need to repeat the sound sequence I hear once I plug in the device?"But that's the main purpose of the emergency phones we've found throughout the game, each of their buttons produced a different tone so can use the orange box to manipulate the tones Phreak installed to unlock his hidden lairs. I believe he had more than the two he's mentioned if we can be bothered to track them all down. "Correct. Keep in mind that when you input a sound there's no way back. If you made a mistake, the sequence will reset and you'll have to go all over. The errors are validated once the inserted sequence length matches the sequence you're given to solve. If you think you've made a mistake, just spam some random numbers and get yourself a new sequence to solve." "What exactly are you working on here?" "Multipronged hardware system breaching. I'm assembling a gizmo that'd allow me to further understand and eventually take over this power grid and all of the gizmos that it's supplying, well... to a certain extent. The method involves voltage fluctuation combined with directed signal manipulation via controlled ionizing radiation." He readjusts his glasses. "Pushing the voltage of any vulnerable system to a certain point, makes the entire gig malfunction in sometimes, maliciously beneficial ways. Once you find that particular voltage value, you can begin to operate on said system with most of its innate protections bamboozled, hence giving extending the playfield further than previously possible. Internal communication is the key aspect I'm aiming for, to intercept it and read all of the messages that are going through. If I ever get to do that, with ionizing radiation," He flexes his glove. "changing the dispatched messages utilizing radiation gives me the ability to virtually take over the entire gig. Digital waveforms can be easily bent, switching voltage levels from high to low and vice versa, forging different instructions in the process. It takes a while to decode the initial message format, to discern which part of it's used for information, identification and destination, among other things, of course. But when it finally clicks," He snaps his fingers. "that's where the fun part begins... Or not, depends how hard are you willing to crunch down all of the combinations your mind can come up with."Sounds like phone phreaking to me. "I have so many questions to ask..." "Keep them for later, we have a crunch ahead of us."We'll get more info out of him at a later date. "I'm ready." "This one is yours now." He gives you the Orange Box. "Before you go, I have a second crunch in mind for you." He walks to the side and picks up some metro tickets. "Take these for a test run. Any train will do. If everything goes as it should, let me know. And now, crunch away, kid." "What are those?" "Isn't it obvious? Forged tickets, plain and simple."Yes so, if you've managed to keep Phreak happy, he'll also supply you with a new quest, this one is very easy. He just gave us forged train tickets, we just use them to fast travel somewhere without paying the travel fee. Then later he can sell us more of them. I'm honestly not sure if the cost of them really balanced out the normal price of a trip, but I guess we'll find out. "How did you make them?" "More on that later." "Alright, see you soon." He has one more gift for us, although that might come later. Assuming we haven't botched up his disposition to us. It's not so important to us I don't think anyway so we won't be too sad if we missed it, but we'll see.  But yes we've got ourselves some nice free train tickets. You can sometimes pickpocket these off of some folks too.  And of course the orange box, complete with Portal and TF2. What a bargain.  As we climb the nearby ladder, we end up back in Core City, and we're not too far from the city markets.   But we're heading up to Upper Underrail to do that thing for Phreak.  Hmm weirdly enough, we seem to have paid instead of using the tickets.. Maybe they don't work on the upper Underrail lines. Ah well, an experiment for another day.  Anyway, the first phone booth we'll check is just near the entrance the Emporion Shopping Mall. A place we haven't fully explore yet.  But I'll be honest, these orange box puzzle are a bit of a drag, so I'll attempt to solve them all next time. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Jan 14, 2024 |
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Jun 19, 2023 12:21
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Oh, hey, today I had a stray thought on the bus that was basically "that LP hasn't updated since forever, I hope the OP is doing well" Good to see this continuing.
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Jun 19, 2023 12:46
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I had also just checked on this thread in my bookmarks the other day, glad to see it going again! And yeah, grad school is like that.
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Jun 19, 2023 16:17
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Yay, I'm excited to see this thread resume! And yes, grad school do be like that.
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Jun 20, 2023 14:24
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Chapter 50 - Phoning in this Abomination When we left off, we were about to plug a magic box into a pay phone.   So as Phreak explained, once we plug the orange box into one of the emergency phones, we get a series of five tones that match to the different buttons. As you can see by option 8, we can also experiment with the buttons to work out which buttons correspond to which tone. You can do this any time during the input and can listen to the sequence as many times as you want.  If you input the wrong sequence, a loud static noise plays, and the sequence randomizes and resets. You have to correctly input the right sequence three times in a row to complete it. If you have a Perception skill of 12, this puzzle is made slightly easier by giving you an associated number to go with each tone.  Mercifully, the tones are unique to the symbols and are also the same for every phone. But apart from this all you can do is familiarize yourself with the tones of each buttons and write down the sequence in terms of the symbols as best as you can. I found that by the last few phones I was getting pretty good at recalling which tone corresponded to what. But it was a slow rear end process. Anyway the colours will flash from red, green, and blue and then your in.  Thankfully there's only five or four of these secret doors and they're all in upper underrail.  The door to the first one is located just below the phone. But there seems to be a lit campfire near it.  It's a random merchant encounter! Why not?  "So, how's life on the rails treating you?" "Meh. Not too bad, but lately I've been startin' to feel my age. It takes some effort movin' these ol' bones from one place to the next, ya know. As years go by... the distance seems greater and greater. Mmm. But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do if he wants to earn some half-decent coin, I tell ya what." "Are beasts and bandits giving you trouble?""Please. I'm a vet'ran, youngster - a true vet'ran. Been roamin' Underrail since before ya got the courage to crawl outta yer mother's tummy, he-he. I got quite a few tricks up my sleeve, don't ya worry - don't ya worry. Instead, ya better worry about them coins ya got on you, 'cause I got some fine stuff to trade. Eh? Wanna?" "Show me what you have."  So the random traveling merchants can be all sorts of different merchant types. In this case it looks like we got a guns guy. And oh boy! He's got stingball grenade blueprints! I've been looking for those. Now we finally have a use for all the rubber balls we've been collecting this whole time. Stingball grenades are essentially an upgraded version of flashbangs. Where flashbangs only incapacitate, stingball grenades will stun. Meaning that if you hit an incapacitated target, they will snap out of their daze and resume attacking next round, whereas stunned targets lose all action until their next turn. So that means they'll lose a full round of action and it'll mildly injure targets to boot! The only real drawback to them is that the stun is only one round, whereas the flashbangs incapacitate is two rounds. But oh well, still a decent upgrade.  We also pick up some hexogen, can never have too much of that good stuff.  Anyway, so Phreak's little hideouts are just tiny rooms full of high quality junk. We're looking for two specific pieces in particular.  This location doesn't actually have what we're looking for, but it does contain a Contact-Activated Capacitative Sheet or CACS for short. So these are the final gift that Phreak will sell you if he really likes you, I'm not sure we'll be able to get him to sell them us, but I guess we'll see eventually. CACS are simply one use items you can apply to any blunt weapon to temporarily imbue it with some energy damage and we can in fact actually use them. The only caveat is that they'll will only work on non-bladed combat gloves. So our main weapon The Claw, is out, and our main backup energy gloves are bladed so they're out too, but we can apply them to our knife-throwers gloves. It might be worth making a set of gloves just to apply some of these to them. Maybe, it's a piddling amount of energy damage to be honest. Although energy damage is a rare and often the hard-to-resist kind of damage.  There's a low frequency shield modulator that's in pretty good nick. Might be worth keeping for our closely approaching expedition.  And some more good quality plasma cores, excellent.  And a very good thought control modulator. Very good for a brain frying psionic.  Anyway, we'll head south and look for more phones to Phreak.  As soon as enter the screen we enter combat. The nearby motioner is just carrying on his magic training and is no harm to us. We hear some crossbows being fired, but nothing seems to hit us hmmm.  Oh its just some Lunatics attacking a bunch of Tchortists.  We give the burgeoning religious organization a helping hand and whip a grenade at the lunatics.  It kills two and seriously injured the other two.  We then put on our knife-throwing gloves and put in some throwing practice.   Burrower poisoned throwing knives are good killin'.  The Tchortists seem... Grateful? Well we'll want to be in their good graces for a time yet.  Anyway, where were we?  The next emergency phone is near an old bandit outpost we butchered all those months ago. We phreak it with no issues.  The door it unlocks in inside the small canteen that the bandits were in.  We find some more nice electronic goods.  Including a very good quality Electroshock Generator, might be worth making a new taser perhaps. Although that just increases the damage the taser will do and doesn't change its ability to stun. Although I do believe if we can't overcome the electrical resistance of a target we can't stun them, so it's not all bad.  And we find the first thing we came to find, A High Voltage Penetrator Core, it's... quite bulky.  Dum dee dum, wandering live train tracks.  And near Fort Apogee, the Protectorates main outpost in South Underail, is the next phone.  So the actual puzzles do get a little harder the more you unlock. The orange box starts to malfunction and you lose the ability to test one of the buttons to check what tone it produces. Not the worst thing, since you can infer which tone it isn't by just checking all the other buttons.     This next one is also a dead end.  Some free flashbangs and a device to improve the temporal manipulation of a psiband. Could be worth having.  Another good find though, some free Mk II and Mk III EMP grenades! All allies in the upcoming Butlerian Jihad are most welcome.  I'm not even sure we can make Mk III EMPs yet. More robot damage and short circuits them for three whole turns. Very nice.   The door to this phone is surprisingly in plain sight.  I believe this is our final functioning phone, at this point the orange box is malfunctioning even more and we can't test two buttons now. Fortunately by this point I've become very familiar with the tones and their corresponding buttons. On higher difficulties the box can malfunction even more by this point, so losing only two buttons isn't even as bad as it could have gotten.  Well I'm glad we're done with that task. Sound puzzles aren't the best. But don't worry, there's a far harder, much worse sound puzzle to deal with later. I've never even bothered to try it the first time I got to it, but I guess I'll have to do it this time.  We find a plasma pistol, the most reliable way to generating energy damage outside of plasma grenades and psionics.  Some more high quality electronics.  A pretty good piece of black cloth.  And the last thing we needed, a handmade remote controller.  With that out of the way, we'll try the forged tickets again. And naturally I didn't see the Use Forged Ticket option the last time I tried this.  Okay, so that's how you use them.  Now we can head back to Phreak.  We'll drop off some of our garbage first.   Oh and here is the Camera Jammer in all of its glory. More goodies to tax our battery supplies.    Anyway let's see what Phreak has for us next.  "I've tried out the tickets you gave me. They've worked like a charm." "They did? Good." He gives you a nod. "Periodically now you can come by for some more tickets. I'll sell them to you at their production cost. Keep in mind that it takes me some time to make them." He pulls out some more tickets. "Here, take these for now, free of charge. A crunch for a crunch."We've not got 8 of these and we can periodically go back to him for more. Again, I'm not sure the price of them is really worth the trip, but hey a perks a perk I guess. "Thank you." Take the tickets. "Need something else?" He goes back to his work. "I've found the items you've asked for." Hand him over the penetrator core and the remote controler. "Alright, time to start the gig." He picks up the components you've provided him with and walks over to the power grid. He plants the core on the floor and attaches the remote controller at the designated spot. After that, he takes the high voltage power cables and plugs then in both the penetrator's core and the power grid itself. Using his glove, he presses several buttons on the controller and a tame buzzing sound starts to emit from the core. "Let's see..." He turns over to his personal computer. "Hmmm, the readings are good but I can see how we can push it even further. Go down to the room below and then head east. You'll find some boilers there. I'll need you to flip the switches on these bad boys. Once you're done, seek their control console and see how the system handles all that pressure. If an option presents itself to pop the system off - do it. I'll stay here and monitor all of the changes. If I recall correctly, there should be around ten boilers." He gives you a thumbs up. "Watch your step..." "I need to watch my step?" "Yeah, it might get... electric down there. I've tangled with those boilers before, and let me tell you, they can be quite... lethal." "What do the readings tell you?" "I'm trying to trigger the safety mechanisms of this entire facility. In order to do that, I need to break some of its designed limitations. Let's just say that right now, we're at about ninety percent. There's no telling what'll happen after that."Sound like it'll do something good I'm sure. "On my way." Leave. So we'll get back to Phreak much much later for some chats.     Okay so now we've got to fiddle with this mess of switches we saw last time.  This puzzle is outright infuriatingly impossible, until you remember that this game has turn based combat.  The trick is, you hit a switch, and then a countdown happens.  When the count down reaches 0, a surge of electricity will discharge through the catwalks.  If you aren't off the cat walks or standing next to a switch when the surge hits you, you'll die.  The more switches you hit, the more death timers you have to consider. Also, if you you don't synchronize the switches, then you trap yourself and the game quickly becomes impossible to finish.  Or does it? You see, you can just pause time and dash from switch to switch when the timers get too difficult to deal with. Was this the way the puzzle was meant to be done? I have no idea, but its saved me from rage quitting this game the first time I reached this point. Now its trivial.  Also, as you can see, once you flip enough switches, steams starts shooting out but it doesn't actually hurt you or make the puzzle harder at least.     And that's essentially it, you don't get much positive feedback for flipping all the switches which is a bit disappointing.  The last thing we need to do is fiddle with this computer to complete the task.  Basically, none of the options work except for the last option, the conduct emergency protocol option, not the leave option. I mean leave works, but well y'know.   Doing all of this opens a door to the east.  And we enter a fairly dangerous room.  We'll ignore what's happening further east of us and go inside the blast doors where that pile of ashes is.   Inside is an industrial bot. We've seen one of these guys before but we've never fought them.  We're going to need our trusty electric gloves for this.  And we'll apply our CACS to the knife-thrower's gloves.  Now we're ready to wail on a giant tin can.  We'll open with a Mk III EMP, both for the damage and the long stun.  As you can see, we did about 100 damage to it and it barely scratched it. These things have I think 700 hp and like all robots are hardy motherfuckers.  We can barely damage it with our punches but we're not really equipped to do much else so we'll just have to keep pummeling it till its dead and hope it doesn't kill us first.  We try out our CACS gloves and it does comparably mediocre energy damage.  The CACS wears off pretty quickly though so its back to our shock gloves, we'll need to keep recharging our gloves, but we've got the battery supplies for the time being.  Okay, well the bot's not dead and we've run out of stuns and it gets two turns of safe mode, protecting it from being stunned again. We cast a slow on it to keep it from being too agile with us.  Not that that helps all that much, basically it's got a decently ranged flamethrower that is pretty painful. We haven't got a lot of fire resistance, if any, either.  Our adrenaline has worn off too, so we're also getting a bit slow and ragged.  We hit it with our taser to get another free turn of walloping.  It chases us out of the blast doors and sets us on fire. Oh joy.   Eventually it manages to go down, finally. Now we can rest and heal our..  Oh for fucks sake.  Yeah so there's also a pair of death stalkers hanging out down east of here and the fireworks seems to have attracted them to us.  Being on fire and full of death stalker poison, and nearly dead is not a good place to be. But luckily we're close to the exit, so we'll just duck out for a second.  Now that we're in better shape, we'll sneak back into the blast door area and see whats to be found first. We'll get to those crawlers later.  We find some nice repair kits, excellent.  And oh boy, my favorite! Biohazard boots! These are, in my opinion, some really good boots. I believe I wore them throughout my entire playthrough the first time I finished them game. Piles of toxic waste are everywhere in this game, so we will be using these a lot for sure. I'm probably overselling them but these boots never steered me wrong.  We find some bars of TiChrome, not sure if we'll ever do anything with them, so we'll leave them here for the time being because they're heavy.  We find enough material to make a Stingball Grenade. This will come in handy one day I'm sure.  More repair kits and some nice spikes and blades worth remembering perhaps.  And oho! A Chainsword! Perfect if you want to Adeptus Astartes your way through underrail. It needs a good chunk of strength to wield, and has a reduced precision value but you get a special ability that seems to pile on more damage every hit. So it's not trouble if you're playing a space marine. Nice and kitschy, but we aren't a sword gal, and certainly not strong enough to wield if properly besides.  A pile of Napalm C is nice though, can always use more napalm grenades.  Okay, now to deal with these crawlers.  Unlike the last trio of crawlers we found, I completely embarrass myself fighting these two fuckers.  They end up killing me and run me around in circles for far too long, I kill them eventually, but it was a sloppy fight. Deathstalkers remain a tremendous pain to fight.   We also pass some more dexterity checks to find some more interesting junk to add to our heap.  Down another ladder and the tunnel starts to look a bit more sewery.  We arrive at a long shaft with the city twinkling above us.  We pull a ladder down and descend below.  Midway down the shaft is a vent going off to somewhere. That way leads deeper into the main plot and is the side step to joining the oligarchs. We'll be going in there in a moment. But first, we can fiddle with a different ladder first.  And climb down it.  We get a choice to go into the pit or the sewers?  So yeah climbing into the sewers takes us to this familiar pit we've seen before. Down below it is a place that was added in a later game update. We'll go check it out.  But first we might wanna try out our new boots and strap on a gas mask.  And down we go.  So now we're in a large area full of toxic sludge and noxious gas everywhere. Funnily enough our boots are resistant enough to protect us from the gas on their own. Don't ask me how, that's just how acid/bio resistance works. Unless your poisoned, then nothing will work.  Anyway, the main star of this place is this shambling little fellah down there. Meet the abomination, an optional boss creature. He looks like a hunchback mutant, but he's a bit special.  For one thing the abomination is pretty beefy. But we can still punch him dirty till he drops.  There. It took a full turn plus psi and adrenaline, but he's done in one. All hail the Invictu-  And he's back. So yeah, the gimmick to the abomination is that he doesn't die so good. You kill him and then a very short while later he'll let out a scream and get back up again.  Even in stealth he seems to just slowly hone in on your position which sucks too. I'm not sure you can properly hide from him. He was standing next to a propane tank so we whipped a grenade at him. It didn't set off the tank, but it'll explode next turn, don't worry.  AAaaand he picks up the propane tank and throws it at us.  Fuckin' ow!  He then proceeds to kill us in two hits from his powerful... claws? Clubs?  So yeah, the abomination doesn't gently caress about.  This time we'll avoid any tricky business and just keep him down.  Just kill him, hide, wait for him to come back, and repeat.  I forget how many time it takes, but eventually he will go down for good.  The actual number of times increases with difficulty too. So he's even harder on DOMINATING. That's on top of the enormous health bonus he gets for being a boss monster too.      Finally, with his last life gone, he lets out a sloppy gurgle that he didn't before and leaves a corpse to loot.  And the only thing on him is a unique oddity, the Abominable Deformed Brain. A nice bit of XP, we're running out of good oddities to find in the base game at this point. We might be fast approaching the need to head on the Expedition if only to get more xp. We'll be going in at a lower level than I'd like if we do though.  With the abomination dead we can slowly turn off all the gas in this room.  Not sure there's any reason to do this. It might help during the fight, but it'd be hard to do given how quickly the abomination can find you.  We seem to have gotten poisoned through all our protection. That sometimes happens, probably a critical failure to resist or something.  This one valve is unable to be closed on account of the garbage.   Anyway that's not all there is down here. There's a small tunnel we can go up that's got a few more explosive barrels that we might have been able to use against the abomination if we were cunning in that particular way. More likely he'd just thrown them at us though.  In the far back in blast door that we can just open.  Inside is a dead Tchortist Missionary next to a bloody valve.  See? It's bloody.  On his person is another decent oddity the Eye of Tchort.  And the main prize of this place, the Tchortist Bioscrubber. Not only does it provide you with the best bio protection of any gas mask, it can be charged to heal you if you stand in toxic gas. Honestly I never really bother with that function, it's battery powered and thus pretty situational. But this is definitely the best gas mask we'll ever find so we'll be keeping this with us. This is the only place you find one of these by the way. Incidentally, does anyone remember the mysterious robed figure we bumped into back in Core City who was fiddling with an electronic lock to a door we couldn't access back in the drop zone? No? Well that happened and apparently this guy is that guy. If you kill him back in Core City this body never shows up here and you can never get the Tchortist Bioscrubber. So no indiscriminately killing strange robed keypad tinkerers.  We could also pinch his robe if we really wanted. There is no advantage to doing so, unless you want some fairly poor stealth gear and a boost to intimidate. It might have some utility at one point, but... I dunno, we'll find other robes at any rate if that's the case.  Anyway that was the pit. Wasn't that fun?  Before we head back up the ladder, we've got some unknown business to take care of in the sewers first.  Of course I've forgotten exactly where the business is exactly, so we'll have to get a little lost.  Not this way, I think this way is part of an oligarch quest we'll probably never get to see.   And this way is a dead end. hmm.  Up here perhaps? We'll try elsewhere first.  We'll grab some sludge to make more gas grenades to keep us nice and versatile.   Aha, this is the way to the acid hunters/ghostface jelly. Not this way.  So this way then?  This isn't the right way, but it's a dead end full of stuff, so let's give it a poke.  Free junk for the dexterous.  There's a lot of inaccessible junk in this place. Sometimes you need the right skill check, sometimes its completely impossible as far as I know.     Just a lot of garbage and broken computers.   Anyway, a whole lot of nothing around here.  So maybe I missed it the last time I came here. Just past this small mutie camp.  And yes, just behind the tent!  So we've been trekking across underrail for a bit now, and it's high time we made some memories.  No not in making these napalm bombs. That's just something for me.  No, back here is the first non-hostile mutant we've found. Well if you don't count Abram of course.  His abode is decorated in assorted leathers, but nothing terribly high quality.  So let's say hi to Booth.  "What is this place?" His hand reaches for his back as he picks up what seems to be a tattoo gun of sorts. It is connected via a long stitched-up cord into a makeshift apparatus; a chemical set of glassware filled with colorful liquid. Even though the place seems to be a mess, a commendable effort was made to maintain the overall hygiene. He uses the tip of the gun to point to a nearby brown table. "I brand those who..." wheeze "wish to engrave and carry onwards their most..." wheeze "special memories until the end of times. Or perhaps" He snorts "to cover things they wish not to see... To look..." wheeze "better."It's kind of a shame we've just mindless been killing all the mutants we've come across so far. The more we begin to learn about them the more tragic their lives become. They are all immortal and all in horrible pain, and everyone kills them on sight. They're like Fallout's ghouls but much less comical and more tragic. "Tell me more about this procedure." "Drawing symbols," He scratches his hand "marks... is the only drive I have left... For a human... a single tattoo." He glances back and forth between you and some drawings. "Free ofcharge." Anyhow, Booth'll give us a free tattoo! "Free of charge?" "To brand a person with a mark..." wheeze "is... uhh... something I see as... as a risk, one could regret forever after, just like I did... with what I've become. To ask anyone..." wheeze "to pay for such an undertaking... would be too much... even for the likes of myself." "Only one tattoo?" "That's how many I've made for myself before all this" He lifts his mutated hands slightly, gesturing hopelessness. "One desire... and one fatal mistake" He shakes his head. "It's a reminder of what..." wheeze "I used to be... and what I've become. I refuse to play the odds and brand the others... lucky to be..." wheeze "normal, with more than one-way..." wheeze "ticket to this hell. It's a faint memory" wheeze "of what I knew about myself and a bridge to becoming..." wheeze "this. The day I had my first tattoo..." wheeze "was the last day I've lost everything." "Alright, let's do it." Point him where you would like to have a tattoo. He nods in approval. After that, he slowly reaches for some of his additional equipment in preparation for the task ahead. "Take a seat on that table" He points once again to the brown table next to him. "or lay down..." wheeze "whatever you feel like." You assume an appropriate position, best suited for the place which you chose to get tattooed. While waiting, only now you get a proper chance to look around. The room is stuffed with scrambled paper, books and all-around junk; it is chaotic to say the least. All of the walls and his furniture are inscribed with letters and drawings; an art of a kind hard to understand at a first glance. There are so many illustrations to a point where they have started to overlap one another, causing them to be convoluted to a point of a total mess. Few minutes go by as you look all around while he gets ready. He sits down on his old stool and is now very close to you. "Now" wheeze "tell me what you'd like to be branded with. Choose" wheeze "wisely."So there's a number of tattoos you can choose from and most of them require you to have done something. Getting one gives you a small permanent bonus of some kind. I'll list the ones we can choose from and what you need to do to get them. There's some we can't get yet, including one that requires you to literally finish the game first. The tattos are: A protectorate tattoo, gives you +8% health, naturally you need to join the protectorate to get this one, so we can't get it. A JKK tattoo, give you +15 persuasion, need to join the JKK oligarch. Which we won't be doing. An Anarchy tattoo, gives you +1% crit chance to weapon and unarmed attacks, need to join the Free Drones, so we could take this if we wanted to. A Coretech tattoo, give you +7 to mechanics and electronics skill, you need to join Coretech security, which we will be doing eventually. A Praetorian Security tattoo, give -2% to getting critically hit, need to join Praetorian security, again we won't be doing this. An Aegis Incorporated, gives +5 to all offensive skills, need to Join Aegis security, which we will do when we join the Expedition. Two spoiler tattoos we won't cover yet. But involve events in Expedition including one that requires us to actually finish it in its entierty too. A tattoo of The Beast, the critter we killed in Foundry, gives you +10% weapon and unarmed damage to beasts. The Black Crawler tattoo, gives +15% to base Stealth skill, need to kill the Black Crawler, which we triumphantly did. Another tattoo that can only be acquired from Expedition A tattoo for killing something we haven't met yet and can't for the time being. The Abomination tattoo, give Natural Health regen that starts at 70% Health instead of 90%, need to kill the abomination which of course we've just done. The tattoo that needs you to complete the main plot. So we'll ignore what that is for now. The institute of Tchort tattoo, that gives you +7 to chemistry and biology, need to join the Tchortists, which we haven't done yet, but soon. Balor's Eye tattoo, gives you +10% to detection, needs you to kill Balor the leader of the Ironheads, which of course we did so. SGS, gives you +2 to all skills, anyone gets this because naturally you're always a member of SGS. Another Expedition spoiler tat for another faction we can join. And the drifter tattoo, gives you +2 move speed, and +5 movement points when not in stealth, you get this if you let Booth choose for you. So all the tats are fairly marginal in what they do, so it's not hugely important which one you pick. Surprised there isn't an Invictus tattoo to be honest. "I want a tattoo worthy of a great slayer of..."Last time I went with the drifter, because more speed never hurts. He awaits in absolute patience.But this time I think we'll go with the Black Crawler because we're the dominator of all crawlers and more stealth never hurts. ... the mother of all nightmares, the Black Crawler... As he was listening to you carefully, he had already begun to draw a sketch on a tiny piece of paper, according to your explanations. Some time passes as the two of you work on the details, until you finally meet at the desired tattoo draft. "Now, let's begin. Don't worry..." wheeze "it won't hurt." "Don't worry about me. I'll be just fine." The mutie's deformed hands reach slowly towards you. Only now you can look at him up-close as previously, the dim light in this room covered the details of his actual skin condition. Every section of his body, all the way to his neck, wherever there's no deformation due to effects of the mutation, is covered with by now, mostly faded out tattoos of various meanings. Abstract drawings, human and animal faces, events, flames, carnage and destruction, only to name the few. Just as is his skin degenerating, some islands of his body have managed to achieve a reverse effect of a slight regeneration. These are the only spots of his body where one's sight could make anything out of those tattoos. The rest is a nightmare to gaze upon. The odor of his body produces a scent which at first, is quite hard to withstand. This is something to naturally expect due to his condition as well as the surroundings you're in. But in reality, it soon starts to become quite the opposite. His delicate movements combined with the smell of the fresh ink he's made, morph said smell into something... weirdly pleasant. Added to the mix is a medical sponge, which he uses to treat you. The echoing noise of the tattoo gun, crackling sound of the loose table and your nerves reacting to the procedure, all together amalgamate into a thrilling experience. Your gaze shifts to the rest of the room. The equipment he's using is in rough shape, however he did a decent job of maintaining it as the tattoo gun stands out quite a bit from the rest of the room. Some of the hanging papers display series of connected events, few closely resembling comic book art. These events feature various encounters, difficult to make much sense of due to the lack of context. Basking in all this art, does prove to be a good distraction. Suddenly, your exploration is interrupted. He wipes his nose onto his shoulder and takes a breather. "How's it..." wheeze "going?" "All's good. I'm enjoying looking at all the art you've got here on display." He nods. Now fully dedicated to finishing the tattoo, the drawing is starting to come to life. Around the tattoo, you can feel your blood pulsating. Combined with the dim light of the nearby lantern, the color of the tattoo glows and sticks out from the rest of the skin. Still fresh, the tattoo marks leave red outlines around it, somewhat taking away from the actual drawing. With each new line drawn, the pain you feel increases, but it's not the kind of pain that would make you pull away from the source. The tattoo is almost finished. He's now applying the finishing touches. It's exactly as the two of you designed it together. It's a perfect match of the sketch he drew for you, but this time it's on your skin. The mutie picks up a clean rag, and wipes off some spots around your tattoo. After that he stands up and proceeds to clean his tattoo gun. "There..." wheeze "it is. Carry it... with pride."And that's that, we're now officially cool. He gave it to us for free but we'll give him some change. At least as an apology for killing all his friends outside probably. "This came out to be impressive." Offer him a tip of 50 Stygian Coins.Don't spend it all on... ... ...sewage? He bows before you. "Thank you." He turns around to his green desk. Now done with cleaning up the tools, he lowers them down. He throws the dirty rag into the nearby trash pile and picks up a bandage to clean up his mutated hands. "I make my living working on the..." wheeze "clothes for the muties around here. Siphoner, hopper and rathound leather... there's a plenty of it around here. If you're interested" [i]wheeze "I could sell you some." "Any rumors around the sewers?" "Memories are fading away..." wheeze "from my mind. Look around you; maybe you'll find something... interesting."The mutants have broken the italics again! Arrgghgh! "Show me your goods."Oh well at least we were done speaking to him...  Booth has the inventory of a hunter, but still doesn't have leathers of quality that we'd really like. But oh well.  We sell him some morphine, because you know, the endless agony.   And with that we quickly rush back upstairs to core city  And with that we're ready to see where the main plot goes next.    Which we'll explore next time.
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Jun 20, 2023 19:55
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Chapter 51 - Cubenapped We're ready to investigate this exciting new location.  There will definitely be robots about so we'll make sure our shock gloves are equipped and nice and charged.  But I've miscalculated, there's not robots on this floor, just more mutants. Oh well.  We're in no danger from a couple of mutant dogs at this point.   We deftly make some leather armor out of the fallen dog.  So we can immediately recycle it into scraps.  This way we craft some patching kits to keep our armor and non electronic punch gloves in good nick. At any rate, we lose sight of the big picture and a hunchback mutant comes to avenge their fallen abomination god.  But we're not so intimidated by over zealous hunchbacks either.  Now I never actually show it off, but the main way we would actually enter this place is from somewhere further east. There's a corridor on this level that has a few crawlers in it. It leads to the door in the drop zone that the mysterious robed figure was tampering with the electronic lock to.  We find the last of the Biocorp Technology Catalog Fragment oddities.  And we find a unique Cybernetic Module oddity. But there's not cyber upgrade station in sight. Darn.  There's also a regenerative vest, I forget if we've seen this or not. You add this to a medium suit of armor and, while the armor is charged, you can slowly regenerate health. I believe the higher quality the vest is, the better it'll heal you too. It's not super useful in my opinion. Healing items are in pretty good abundance, and you're better of saving batteries for something more useful. Might be handy on DOMINATING difficulty though when resources are much more scarce/expensive.  Another decent Temporal Manipulation Modulator, which will make a nice psi headband one day maybe.   Not too much left on this floor but more mutant dogs to mop up.    At the far back is some stairs deeper into the complex. I should note that this is a fully functional facility, why there are mutant roaming about on the upper floors is a little strange.  Okay, NOW we need to look out for robots.   So this floor can be entirely skipped if we really wanted to. But the center of the floor has a server room that we will want to explore first.  Otherwise the stairs further down and pretty close by.  But yes, there are a handful of plasma sentries wandering about. We've got a fair few EMP's to throw about, so we'll make good use of them.    Fortunately plasma walkers are surprisingly kind of fragile if they don't their shields up, well relatively, compared to say the industrial bot.   There are also a number of cameras about the place too, to make matters more annoying as well. We can just quickly punch one down and then run off when the robots go to investigate though.  Anyway, there's a few more robots, they're annoying but we manage to smash them all without any major hiccups.       The last one we kill happens to have a Self-consciousness Module oddity on it.  And that gives us another level up!  Another boring odd level. Not much to do but continue to up-skill.  We keep specializing in our stuns as best we can.  And slowly crank up our Technology skills and our Temporal and Merchant skills as best we can.  There's a bunch of a old storage about.  Nothing terrible exciting in them.  There's a small room with a breaker box and the camera monitors in it, you can probably disable the cameras with the breaker box maybe. But anyway, we'll investigate the console.  You can see there's also some vents around you can you to evade the bots if your that way inclined.  Now you've probably all forgotten, but we were tasked by the secret Oculus society group to investigate the whereabouts of an old biocorp higher up called Wit Nosek and determine what he knew about The Ark project. We tracked down some old files of his in his old lab in upper Underrail. If you do this, you get a document code, which you can enter into this computer.  It's not very exciting as its essential a corrupted file with some old staff names in it. But we do learn Wit Nosek had an assistant who went by 'Al'. Believe it or not this is useful information. It doesn't help up track Wit down, but it does give us something we will need later.  That's all there is to see around here, so we're heading down stairs.  This is last floor of this place and we're getting closer to our quarry. I guess I'll point out that we're actually inside of a Coretech Security research facility. If we'd joined up with any of the Oligarch's they'd ultimately point us to go here, either to infiltrate the place to steal the cube from there or to go check up on it if we had joined Coretech.  As it stands, we just blindly stumbled into the place instead.   And there in the center of that lab, is the cube. It's clearly not very cube like.   Uh oh...  Some Tchortists are here.  And they just fried those scientists brains.  And stole our precious Macguffin!  And the left the way they came in. We'd better go after them.  But first, we'll loot this Lab Rat oddity. Hey Cancer mouse...  And we can check out what Coretech learned about the cube.     Okay so it seems to be alien in origin. It's can plugged into something and had something to do with general relativity. Definitely something we don't want to fall into the wrong hands.  Now we should rush after them.   And they trapped their escape route, bah.  Twice! And you can't avoid that one.  Luckily they're not smart enough to investigate their own traps oddly enough. But there's three of them and one of us. Not a fair fight at all.     See? Totally unfair.  Welp, those remaining cultists didn't have the cube on them, so they've probably taken back the Intitute of Tchort back in upper Underrail. At least our quest list has been updated and it tells us to infiltrate them now. We should go see Tanner for advice about doing that first. Eventually.  For now we'll deal with this Oculus task first. And probably a few other things. I'm tossing up if we should go into the Institute before we head to Expedition. We could do, there's a ton of stuff to do in there and we're still a little under leveled for the Expedition. We might be okay I dunno.  Anyhow, here's our tattoo feat we got last time.  We also got this feat for solving the orange box puzzles, extra detection is nice. It'll help spot crawler more easily and offset our horrible perception skill.  Anyway, it's back to the market place!  To unload/sell off our crap.  We can finally get rid of that ring we've been carrying and any ammo we're holding onto.  We can also sell this psi mentor that we can't use for some extra batteries too.  Anyhow, let's track down Wit Nosek. To do this, we'll have a chat with Sophie here.  "Nothin' girl. 'Sup with you?" "Nothing. Just chillin'. Like, I'm just hanging out, trying to find some fun." "I'm Henrietta. Can I ask you a few questions?" "It's cool. I'm Sophie. So, what do you want, zoner?" "What can you tell me about yourself, Sophie?" "I'm bored; Thought I was gonna, like, have some fun here. But no - it's duller than watching mushrooms grow..." She makes a brief pause, watching you with some hidden intent. Then, her eyes widen as she expresses her demand. "Amuse me, zoner."Sophie is a rich fail daughter. She's insufferable, but we can use that to our advantage. "Amuse you? How would I do that?" "Do I have to do everything? Think of something, you're the zoner here."Nothing we can do or have will amuse her, so we'll need to think of something. "Gotta run. See ya."We'll need a cat carrier, which we just so happen to have on us, so with that we'll train back to Foundry and head to their mines.  Go to see the mines are up and running again.  There are now miners all over the place now.  We'll catch another one of the borers, I'll bet Sophie will like this.    "I think I have a way to amuse you." She yawns. "You better do it fast, zoner. Or else I'm gonna fall..." She snores loudly and then twitches. "Wha-- Wha--" She puts on her dull look again, waiting for you to do something entertaining. "Check this creature out. Show her the captured borer. She takes a long look at the creature, as if hypnotized by its odd appearance. "That's gross, but kinda cool. Actually, very, very cool... What is it?" "It's called a psimorph, a creature that can fuse with rock."This dialogue for this got cut off, this game doesn't seem to like it when you scroll down through any text. When you skip to the next lines of dialogue, all of the newer response options will have scrolled down and can't be seen or reached in any way. It's not a common issue but it's very annoying when it happens. The only way I've found to deal with it, is to make sure that I'll scroll up to the top of the dialogue before picking a conversation choice. It'll be a lot more irritating come Expedition time when the amount of dialogue shoots through the roof... I think it's largely an issue of them giving you ability to rescale and resize all of the dialogue, but not realizing that sometimes unexpectedly breaks the conversation functionality. I wonder if its a known bug... hmm... Given they're working on the sequel now Stygian are probably not supporting this game all that much anymore. "Hard-freaking-core! Just... just hardcore. I want it. I want it now! I'll call him... hmmm, something cool. Eviscerator! No... Goreworm! No... Hmmm..."Anyway, the reason I brought it up was that I attempted to adjust my window to fruitlessly see the rest of the text, and misaligned the recording window slightly and I didn't manage to fully correct it. So the images will have a slight artefact on the left side of them for the rest of the update and the next. Apologies for that. "If you like it so much, take it. It's yours." "Hardcore! Thank you, zoner. You make me think better of your kind... I'm gonna take him home and give him some hardcore name." She pauses for a second, watching you. A moment passes, and a product of her thoughts gets presented. "Hey zoner, um, wanna join me?" "Why not. Where do you live?" "The Talloski Manor." She laughs. "In case you didn't figure it out by now, I'm Sophia Talloski, daughter of Vlatko Talloski. I'm sure you've heard of us, unless you're a real zoner." She laughs. "Our mansion is in the residential area; yeah, it's just by the Praetorian Security building. I'm going there now. If you want to see me and Bloodeater... nah... still not hardcore enough. Anyway, if you wanna come over - feel free to do so." She smiles. "Goodbye for now, zoner."Yes so as I mentioned Sophie is the spoiled child of the wealthiest family in Core City, the Talloski's. Well we can now enter their personal mansion as we please. "I might stop by. See you, Sophie."Which we shall do.  Right now.     "Can I come in?" He pulls out a mobile computer. "Your name?" "Henrietta" He taps the device a few times before speaking again. "You're on the list, which means you are free to come in. Welcome to Talloski Manor. One word of warning, though: Your movement is restricted only to the first floor. Unless specified otherwise, getting caught anywhere else in the manor will have serious consequences. Enjoy your stay."Next time we brush up against high luxury. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 24, 2023 13:39
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Wrong portrait for "I'm gonna take him home and give him some hardcore name." She pauses for a second, watching you. A moment passes, and a product of her thoughts gets presented. "Hey zoner, um, wanna join me?" And wrong portrait for "Can I come in?" And don't loot the place too hard, you'll wind up with indigestion.
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Jun 24, 2023 23:12
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SIGSEGV posted:Wrong portrait for "I'm gonna take him home and give him some hardcore name." She pauses for a second, watching you. A moment passes, and a product of her thoughts gets presented. "Hey zoner, um, wanna join me?" Cheers, I haven't been on my meds at all this last week so I'm a tad scatter brained.
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Jun 25, 2023 00:32
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That's still a good hit rate for scatter brained.
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Jun 25, 2023 00:34
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SIGSEGV posted:That's still a good hit rate for scatter brained. Well in theory it should be scatter proof. I wrote a script to automate adding in all character portraits but I still need to add in some numbers so it knows which portrait to put where. So I'm glancing over the dialogue and putting the wrong numbers in the wrong places. I guess it doesn't help that the conversation scripts in the game also use numbers as well but no matter.
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Jun 25, 2023 08:45
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Chapter 52 - To Transfiniity and Beyond! So the Talloski manor, despite being the lap of luxury, is still kind of a shithole, but that's South Underrail for you.  And yes our exploration options are limited, well legally they are, but when did the constraints of law concern us?  We'll poke about where we're not allowed to for a bit. Like downstairs for instance.   We can see they're got a well stocked supply of fresh livestock.  And nice spacious vents, ahh decadence.   This electronic lock unlocks the east most door, which is another way to infiltrate the manor. If you're agile enough you can also climb up onto their balcony and get in that way. Naturally every floor will be hostile if we attempted that however.  Luckily we manage to find some more oddities to round out our collection. Honestly surprised we haven't maxed out this one yet.  There's also a kitchen and chef down here too.  Quietly sneaking back upstairs, we immediately bump into the patrolling guard who seems unfazed by our odd choice of position and the fact that we were sneaking.  Up at the north end of the house we find Sophie has named the borer Drilleg. For reasons which she will soon explain.  She's hanging out on the balcony.  "Did you name your little pet?" "Yes, I did! I was thinking about all these hardcore names, but nothing sounded... hardcore enough. Then it hit me! Literally, the creature hit me with its drill-head thing... in the leg. Drill... Leg.. Drill... Leg... "So I named him Drilleg!" She laughs. "Drilleg - say it... Drilleg. Driiiiii-leeeeeg.The way you roll the 'r' makes it sound... evil!" She laughs "with a sinister laugh."Oh to be able to shove her off this balcony. "What can you tell me about the Talloski family?" "Pfffffff... I don't know, like, Dad's a successful businessman; he earns loads of money and we've got, like, this big mansion in the best part of Core City. We've got ourown security - which is hardcore - but my dad's also good with Chief Knight so, like, Praetorian Security keeps us safe wherever we go." The ultra wealthy are good friends with the head of the local police force? Simply unheard of! "What about other family members?" "Um, Mom works together with Dad... and so does my doofus brother, Maxim. Grandpa also lives with us, but he's always upstairs, doing his crazy thing. It's old-man stuff I seriously do not care about."We can meet her failson brother Maxim down by the arena. He's a total loving creep though so we won't be dealing with him. "What can you tell me about your grandfather?" "You want to know about my grandpa? Actually, he's my great-great... great-grandfather... Something like that. He's, like, older than Underrail itself. Look, I'm bored... I'm definitely not talking about Grandpa.Grandpa sounds... peculiar. Assuming Sophie just isn't as dumb as she appears to be. Which honestly she's probably is. "What can you tell me about your brother?" "Ugh, don't ask me about him. He works with Dad, helps him run the trading business, or better yet - "helps" him run the trading business." She laughs. "You know what I mean, zoner? He's all about finding excuses to, like, get off work and either visit the Arena, or hit on every woman that walks beside him with some stupid pick-up line. And the lines, they are so, so lame..." "Goodbye"Well that's the last interaction we'll be having with Sophie thank god for that.  You know they're rich, they've got two toilets! Two!  So anyway we rush upstairs, making sure to eventually enter stealth, one of the guards will patrol between both levels.  In the side here is an old cinema system.  I was perplexed by this line. As it turns out that you make it safe for yourself to explore upstairs by going back to Oculus and have Twitch, the guy at the top floor of Oculus, will give you one of the robotic burrower spawn things that Abrahm gave us and use it to cause this TV to malfunction. Then Vlatko Talloski will see that we're a poor person and hire us to fix his TV, he can then pay us to fix it and then we get free roam of the upper floor. Well mostly.  Anyway, I had no idea that you could do that, because why on earth would anyone think to go back to Oculus and do that?  We see a number of bedrooms upstairs, I believe this is probably Maxims room.  We'll steal his cash and oddities.   We also find Vlatko himself hanging out in his bedroom. For a powerful businessman he sure does dress shabbily. South Underrail I guess. His wife is nowhere to be found, I believe she is in North Underrail on business or something.    Breaking into the adjacent bedroom, which is probably Sophies, and swipe her booze and cash.  And behind the electronically locked door is some more stairs up.  At the top is a dilapidated makeshift laboratory and very old man.   "The rampant DNA fraying... it is not accidental... it was not a mistake... secrets hidden in these long branches..." "Are you Wit Nosek?"And we've found Wit Nosek. Just how old is he anyway? He doesn't seem immortal like some of the other people we've met and he's clearly not a mutant... The name rings a bell for him and for a while he seems to focus on your words more intently. "Thallo... thallo... of nature and order... and of long strands of madness..."He's also very much lost his mind. But maybe we can still get something out of him. "I need to know what you discovered working on The Ark "We do not need... to know anything... madness is in the long strands... Who is the woman asking me to travel down the spirals?"This is where learning the nickname of his assistant comes in handy. If we tracked him down otherwise we woudln't be able to learn anything else from him until we figured out that. "It's me - Al. Your assistant." His eyes light up at the sound of that name. "A1..." He places his hands on the sides of your head, clasping it while inspecting you intensely. For some reason, probably madness, he recognizes you as his former assistant. "Al, there's so many things... I have to tell you..." He releases your head and grabs you by the shoulders instead, shaking you occasionally as he explains. "Not enough time, though... not enough time. They keep coming and questioning me. Probing me for answers to the questions they should not dare ask. The answer is in the long branches. Deep within.... it's hidden. And it's doubly encoded - first in the DNA structure and then in the ribosomal RNA spread. But here's the clever part, Al." He chuckles. "You're going to love this. The second decoding mechanism is not inside the organism. It's in the symbionts." With his mouth gaped, his face freezes up with a look of exhilaration as if he just conveyed you the meaning of life itself.Well that's all very unclear, but luckily we've got a decent biology skill so we can get him to tell us more. (Biology) "Are you talking about the human genome? What genes should I look at? What are these symbionts?" His face and the rest of his body is still frozen in the same position.or... maybe not... "Wit?" As you try to bring him to his senses, his grip on you loosens and he falls flat on the floor. He's dead. So yeah, that's as much as we can learn about whatever it was Wit and the rest of Biocorp were up to at this point. Not a whole lot to be honest. Wit also has nothing on his person but an adrenaline shot.  His lab is not really stocked with any answers either.  He does have a bunch of nice psi mentors though, they'll sell for a bunch at least.  And another three-eyed skull if you managed to not find the other one.  And a blue print to make frag grenade cases out of metal plates if we really were lacking them, that's okay I guess.  And that's that. There are many mysteries in Underrail, and answers are not often forthcoming. Not directly anyway. Perhaps we will learn more later. But we will probably never fully learn the extent of most things. Much like real life.  Well that's the Talloski manor.  Back to Oculus with us now.  We can report our finding to Azif.  "I spoke to Wik Nosek."  "Did you, now? And where did you find him?" "He was in Core City." "I see. Is he... an old man now?" "Pretty old, yeah." "I see. Go on - did he tell you anything about his research?" "He told me some things about..." Tell him what Wit told you an how he died. "Hmmm..." Azif dwells on what you told him for a while. "This is interesting, but without the research documentation, there's not much to go on. And you say you didn't find anything on him or his premises?" "Abosolutely nothing." "Very unfortunate. But still, you did well, yes. Tracking him down must not have been easy. One thousand charons is your reward, as well as this." He hands you some manner of electronic device. "I think you'll find this very useful. I don't have anything else for you to work on right now so you are free to pursue your own leads and opportunities. We'll be here if you need us and do remember that you still have the resources and the tools of Oculus at your disposal." And with that out of the way, we're basically done with Oculus. Naturally we can still come here anytime and talk to people and trade, but as far as their quest line goes, it's all wrapped up. It's honestly a little short, but I guess given it's all content that can be easily missed out on, its not all that surprising really.  Anyway our reward for tracking down Wit Nosek, as well as the 1000 Charons we got is the Huxkey. It's basically a combined lockpick, haxxor, and multitool all rolled into one. As well as giving a boost to hacking and lock picking. Essentially, it means we don't ever need to carry around or locate lock picks ever again and also we don't need to worry about lugging around a multitool anymore either. Luckily it only needs power to hack things too, so it won't drain it battery if we attempt to pick locks with it or open vents. It's a minor blessing, but there will definitely be times where we be far away from any shop and have a lot of locks to pick so this will save us from sourcing new lock picks. In that sense it's handy and neat. It will never leave our side.  Farewell Oculus.  Although.. there is one place we never checked out fully. We can climb down the cliff next to Oculus...  Down below is a narrow cavern system we can explore.  It's got a few Death Stalkers in it. Oh joy! My Favorite!  After reloading and being more cautious with them they all get a good squishin'.       Then there's another way down even further.  Where we run into a small band of the Lunatics Gang. Someone inside Oculus mentioned that the Lunatics were weirdly drawn to the place and that the them and crawlers were constantly getting zapped by its external security system.  So yeah these Lunatics are friendly. Sorta. They are if you're also a psionic and or located Oculus proper apparently. "Do you actually see what's up there?" "A path to enlightenment, a path to exceed, all that is human, all that is weak." "I'm uncertain of what's going on here. What do you see up there?" "A sight to be smelled, a feeling to be seen. Can you hear its beautiful color, can you read its majestic heat?"They're uh, pretty incoherent though. Still we can play along with them. "You have my attention. Tell me more." "Let the all-seeing one taste your needs, let him heal your fears. He will tell you all, and more than you'll ever need." He raises his hand and points you to the middle of the encampment. With a slight nod, he invites you to go inside. "I'll look around." This place isn't the largest.  There's a number of fairly tough Lunatics all in close quarters. With horrible rhyme schemes. We could fight them all, but it'll be a rough fight and we don't actually need to.  There's a blocked cave back here, I guess this is where they got the materials to make their scrap shacks I guess?  The leader of this place is hanging out in the largest shack.  And he's the most incoherent of all.  He shuts his one visible eye; his hands are convulsing but remain close to his body. The pentagonal gem on his forehead begins moving, inching, as if seeking the perfect position, which apparently is not the center. "Mmmmm..." The pentagon rotates slightly. His hands relax before his eye opens with a new shade of clarity. "Mmm. The lines. Angles. Forms. Their intersections within Finity - markers of Transfinity." His eye darts around with curious regularity and precision. "What the senses perceive, the mind can manipulate. Lines, angles - forms. Lines - angles - forms." He once again closes his eye and takes a few steady, serene breaths. It opens yet again, its singular stare falling upon you. "Is... is it time?" So at this point, we can just steal the gem he has on his head, we have the dexterity to pull if off. But if we do that we'll set everyone hostile and we won't glean any info from what's happening down here. So we'll just play along with their insanity for now. "Yes, oh All-seeing One." "Then your transformation may begin." He looks at everyone in the room. "Follow me - we'll gather the rest." Follow him. We all head toa small mound of stone that leads up to the bottom of the Oculus.   The Synthesthete makes a convenient bridge out of psychokinesis force fields.       He starts thrusting his hand back and forth.    And he gets got by the Oculus security system.    Yeah so we won't be doing that. "I'm not ready." "Are you certain? If we stop now... ...it'll be long before we could do it again. Do not be afraid."Welp I guess we'd better get ready to fight then. "I'm certain, oh All-seeing One." "Then... ...we will stop." His arms lower, and the force fields begin to fade. "Shame."Oh... Well that's an unexpected reaction. Follow him back. "Orange?" "When you speak... I s-see orange." He readjusts his gem. "You sound... orange. You are not ready." He looks at you, but his weary, bloodshot eye can barely make out your shape let alone anything beyond. "See the Formedicator, yes. He should have something to help your mind... and your current form." "There is a building up there, a pyramid - the Oculus." "Octahedron! Its lines, angles... ...ssssoundss..." He readjusts his gem. "A marker of Transfinity." "But there are people inside. Keeping track of everything that's going on in Underrail." He smiles. "You sense it all so well, Orange, so well, yet somehow you are not ready to transform... Shame. You mustn't doubt yourself - mustn't be afraid. These people in there, they are no longer people, no longer finite forms - they've transformed. And what you describe as 'keeping track' is... mmmmm, perceiving existence with a single, unified sense. Because..." He smiles, and his eye gleams. "...sensing back into Finity is, with such perception... trivial." "When is the next transformation going to take place?" "Transformations are... exhausting. When the time is right - and when enough have gathered." What's wrong with your senses? "Nothing is wrong. They are all one. A taste of Transfinity." He readjusts his gem. "They are just too, too potent for Finity, and need to be... ...controlled."Well I have no idea what transfinity is but I we might have something to improve his clarity. "Maybe this can help you control your senses? Show him the Juice." "The Formedicator has prepared for us... many things." "Try this. You can trust Orange." His stare almost seems to ask 'can he?' but then he does approach the bottle. You open it for him, and as soon as he catches a whiff of what's inside, he leaps back and grabs his ears. "Ahhhh!" He spits aside a few times and starts scratching himself as if a swarm of ants is nesting inside his robes; then he reaches for his gem, twisting it, turning it - to no avail. "Nnnnhhhhh..." But then... "It's..." His gem readjusts itself again, trying out a few spots on his forehead, each one widening his now smiling lips further and further. "What is this, Orrr-- Cyan?" "I'm Cyan now?" "Y-yes... Cyan" "It's the Juice, man." "The Juice..." "Want more?" He pauses, licking his lips and looking around. "Yes. Finity's imperfections... I sense faint new details in them. New, mmmm..." He licks the air. "Tastes... new lines... angles - spiral forms... If I can s-sense all this... maybe others can as well. Yes... yes. It would help them... help them transform." "First one's free. Here." Give him the Juice. He takes the bottle, looking at it curiously, as if amazed how such a usual bottle can contain such an unusual liquid. He sniffs it again - his pupils dilating inmmediately upon doing so - then after a few moments of uncertainty he brings it to his lips. "KHHHHhhhhHHHHH! The taste... Nnnnnww--what the tongue tastes the ear hears... ...what is h--... heard is spoken... ..the word isss s-scEnt..." He attempts to readjust his gem, both mentally and physically, but then he just rips it off his head and throws it on the desk. You now see both of his eyes - looking in separate ways, tracking different things in a twisted unnatural way. "Trans-f-finity... soOOOoo... mmMM... beAutiful, nnNNnn... ...and w-whAt? the s-eNses! perrrrceiVe... the mmmmmind... c-can..." The table starts to rumble, the shelves begin to sway, and beds are rattling as if they're trying to come to life. "Cast! Cast! Cast!" He pushes everyone out of the way and rushes outside, followed by a trail of psychokinetic disturbance and joyous laughter. You pick up his gem from the floor, where it fell after the desk started to shake. And that's the peaceful way to obtain the Synesthetic Refocus. It's a pretty neat eye gem for psi builds. It boosts perception and lowers psi costs and detection when 'focused' but reduces these when 'unfocused'. What that means is if your character is standing still, they're focused which provides you with an accuracy bonus normally. So if you move in combat then you lose focus. If you look at Henrietta's portrait in the above image you can see the icon in the lower right corner of it that means she's in focus. Anyway, this gem isn't terribly useful to us at all, but we'll hang onto. We can actually improve it somewhat too. But that's going to require some new accommodation first which we'll start working towards in the next few chapters.  Before we head out, we'll have a quick chat with the Formedicator.   Scars left by the lightning strike leave a remarkable shape colored in red, featuring a pattern closely resembling plant roots. On several spots, these wounds rupture the body, further revealing the devastating damage caused by the impact. From time to time, the physician would gently touch the corpse with his left hand in search for signs of life. As he moves from one spot to another, the mild mist of dust perfectly makes way so that it wouldn't make contact with him. "Malformations... colors of doubt... stench of foul regret... a pulsating weight of any temperature... I must find it all... and cleanse it. Only then the transformation is complete." "Well, have you found any?" "Hmmm... The cold and empty feeling of doubt still defiles my vision. Countless times have we found insidious incarnations of malfunctioning transformations. Personalities born out of the tiniest of doubts one can have during a moment, manifested into beings of their own wants and hideous wishes. Elusive, stubborn, ferocious... such monstrosities would never back down to stay afloat, swiping anyone or anything in their way." He pulls his hands back, finishing the examination. In doing so, the levitating dust settles down, making a mess inprocess. "It'll take a few more of these... over several days too." "Any unexpected outcomes so far?" "The hooks to the Finity are too many to count. Perhaps the worst one would be... a total rejection of transformation... most likely caused by false belief..." He scratches his head. "Getting reformed back here... violent and consumed by madness... forcing us to take extra measures to correct their futile convictions. Only then we would trully know that the form has made it over. Now, leave me be. I must make sure to contain our brothers discarded husk." He picks up a rug and starts to clean the autopsy table.Well, literally all of these people are utterly incoherent to me. But whatever we're done with this place. "Before I leave, do you have anything for trade?"  He doesn't sell anything too exciting.  Except he's probably the only vendor in the base game that has a chance of selling a Hypercerebrix! We'll grab it, these are rare and one of the only ways to actually increase your intelligence. We can make them ourselves eventually, but it'll be awhile. We'll want some more intelligence for a few choice conversations, although sadly it won't be possible for us to reach high enough intelligence levels to see them all. Unless I possibly do some careful retooling of our levelling plan... hmmm...  He also sells a Psionic Accelerator which increases psi regen not very useful to us but it handy to a powerful psi build in a drawn out fight.  And that's about everything there is to see down there.   We'll make our way back to Phreak to finish up the last quest he gave us.   "The facility is now fully overcharged. What's next?" "I've seen it from down here. A crunch well done." He reveals the palm of his right hand to you It contains a device, best described as a thin layer of intricately connected electronics, akin to a metal foil. Once stretched, this sheet could cover a large flat surface. "Here I have some CACS for you. Stick these to your blunt tools and watch them go crazy on contact with any hard surface. The heavier the impact you can achieve, the more they'll cook the spot. I use them myself." He shows you his glove more closely, where you can see that on its top, this thin material completely coveres it. "You go: 'Cac, cac , cac!' whenever you clobber some gizmos."Aha! We did get his final reward, sweet. "Nice, can you make more of these?" "That I can but they'll cost you. They take some time to craft, too... Also the price is not negotiable, since I'll you charge with no gain for myself." He takes a deep breath. "And now, this is where the slow and tedious process of brute crunching begins. I won't need your aid any time soon."So yeah we can now periodically pick up any of his gadgets when we need them. Provided we don't join one of the oligarchs, which will probably will be shortly. "Can I have some more of your forged tickets?" "I've got a dozen done. This batch will cost you 100 charons."I 'crunched' the numbers and realized that a train ticket to anywhere from anywhere in this game cost 25 charons, Phreak gives you 12 forged tickets for 100 charons, so that's roughly paying three times less money for a train ticket. Given that we have access to teleportation technology this is probably not worth it, but whatever we're flush with cash and they don't weigh anything so we'll live a little. Pay 100 Charons. "Here you go." He gives some Forged Tickets. "Rail away, kid." He nods at you. "Thanks." "You seem to be involved in many dangerous activities.. What gives?" "The endorphins I get from crunching at the edge of gigs, ahhh" He takes a deep breath. "To push gizmos to their edge, and yourself too, always produces the best, most unpredictable and memorable experiences. Just think about it... everything that sticks into your brain comes from such events. That's what I seek and that's what I crunch for. But, it sometimes comes with some heat, burning right behind your back. No one'll give you a sign of approval to mess up their gizmos. Heh, even if you're that derailed, you could count that as an added bonus to all the... madness your life can become from all of that - excitement overdose. My knowledge of hardware hacking has brought me here. Forget about using some gizmos made for rookies to nibble on some gigs." He looks away. "Those are trash - it's all about putting your hands to the heart of the matter - the ones and zeroes. With the help of some tech" He flexes his right hand glove. "and with enough will to crunch, anything's possible." He readjusts his glasses. "I've breached a great deal of gizmos but few still elude me. Notably, the holdings of the fat rats. They have their own power supplies and are disconnected from the rest of the gizmos in the city. I'm tethering on the edge of a breakthrough, but it always eludes me by this much." He gestures you a symbolic length with two of his fingers. "Overcharging this power grid here, may provide me with some access points, previously thought to be unreachable." "Interesting." He nods at you and goes back to work. "So, about the hacking stuff you do around here..." "What about it?" (Hacking) "Your methodology is outdated. You should start using the cutting edge stuff like a real pro." "You're joking, right?" He raises his voice. "Buzzing yourself good while using the gizmos made by someone else? Don't you see how limited your reach becoms once you confine your crunch to such means?" "You're underestimating the prowess of modern hacking devices." "Well, for the sake of everyone's future I hope you're correct. They ought to be better over time. However, an old dog can learn only so many tricks. And those that I know, serve me well enough."Phreak is extremely hard to impress, but we've got a gadget that'll bring a little joy to his old, dessicated, nerd heart. "Check this one out." Show him the Huxkey. The image of his stubbornness and self confidence shatters as the pupils in his eyes dilate at the mere sight of such contraption. With great care, his old hands grasp the Huxkey as he proceeds to inspect it's every tiny detail. At the bottom of his glove, blue light starts to flicker seemingly without rhythm, yet still in conjuncture with the now wildly flashing screen of his personal computer. His face fails to hide the joy of such opportunity, as an ear to ear smile emerges across it. The more time passes by, the more expressions he'd makes, some resembling happiness, the others genuine curiosity but also a feeling of wonder and awe. He eventually conducts his humble investigation and returns you the device. "Now this... this is a real gizmo. Wh-where did you get this?" "I'm not allowed to tell you."Uhh fell off the back of a train. Forgeddaboudit. "I see, I see... Before this one, I thought I knew about all of the gizmos out there..." He wipes his eyes. But, you've proven me wrong and for that... I'm grateful to you. We spoke enough for now, crunching won't get done on its own." He returns to his assignments. Leave Next time we'll tie up some very old quest threads and start helping out the Free Drones. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Jun 29, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 08:59
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Zeniel posted:Well in theory it should be scatter proof. I wrote a script to automate adding in all character portraits but I still need to add in some numbers so it knows which portrait to put where. So I'm glancing over the dialogue and putting the wrong numbers in the wrong places. I guess it doesn't help that the conversation scripts in the game also use numbers as well but no matter. I've been mostly glancing over your new updates (haven't got the time to sit down and read them fully atm), but this script sounds like something that the LP making resources thread would appreciate to have.
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Jun 25, 2023 13:10
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my dad posted:I've been mostly glancing over your new updates (haven't got the time to sit down and read them fully atm), but this script sounds like something that the LP making resources thread would appreciate to have. Good to know. I'll consider making a post about it in there at some point. I've essentially got two different scripts that I use to make the whole process much less of a pain for me. One that adds in character portraits to save me copy pasting the same line of text over and over and another which scrapes the urls for images I've taken from a given recording session off of lpix.org into a single text file so I can do what would normally take a good chunk of an incredibly tedious and repetitive day take only a minuten or two. They're both pretty simple but latter requires a specific python modules and some other programs so it might not be crazy user friendly but I've made lots of comments and can go through it as best I can. I'm no software engineer, I learned to program through my physics degree and finding whatever worked best for me. So it's probably not the most user friendly and clunky as all hell.
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Jun 25, 2023 14:46
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Oh no, the thread is making my tablet try to commit suicide again. Also, I think a few of the Sophie portraits aren't loading, though that may be my device.
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Jun 29, 2023 04:30
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Don't worry, we can certainly try to pad it out a little, also you can probably get some mileage out of changing the page length to 20 posts, that'd probably be helpful.
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Jun 29, 2023 04:39
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SIGSEGV posted:Don't worry, we can certainly try to pad it out a little, also you can probably get some mileage out of changing the page length to 20 posts, that'd probably be helpful. Woah you can do that? I had no idea. EDIT: Also yes, I checked my script and I did forget to put in a portrait prompt, bah! I think it was just the one and should be fixed now I hope. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Jun 29, 2023 |
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Jun 29, 2023 11:08
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Yeah, you can change the number of posts per page in the user control panel. Setting it to 20 or 10 posts per page is particularly nice for screenshot LPs
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Jun 30, 2023 06:42
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Incidentally I just bought a new laptop, both because I think I bought my last one in 2011 so was starting to not be able to play certain games well if at all and its been running a bit clunkily and also my research project for my masters needs more recent hardware. At any rate this means I need to migrate my lp to the new laptop and reinstall all the necessary software and update my scripts to make it all run and smooth again, so there will be a small delay. Well small assuming I get it all up and running before semester kicks off, I'm trying to make good use of my break time to get a head start on everything as the next load of coursework is known to be pretty full on. But the lp will go on.
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Jul 2, 2023 04:54
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Right now on Steam you can get Underrail with its DLC Expedition for $10.38 and if you want to spend a little bit more you can get the game for $12 on GOG which are both great bargains for game deserves a bigger audience. If you don't own Underrail yet please buy it. Edit: Stygian Software a few days ago announced a Second DLC for the game, Underrail: Heavy Duty. Expedition is excellent, so I am looking forward to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpaFg6mnlak side_burned fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Oct 1, 2023 |
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Jul 2, 2023 21:10
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Hello everyone. My sincerest apologies for the extremely long delay since my last post. On top of grad school work, my personal life took a bit of a messy turn and things haven't been super stable for me. Things are still a bit wobbly on that front, my current living situation is fine but not strictly sustainable for much longer I suspect. On top of that I had to rewrite some of my code for my lp design work flow and my ADHD and generally laziness also played a major contribution. At any rate, the lp is always been at the back of my mind somewhere and I still very much want to finish it at some point. It will go on and I hope to start producing updates again if not tonight then certainly on Christmas. I've nowhere else to be and have too much time on my hands. Also, this coming year will be a little more relaxed since I won't have much in the way of course work so I can work to my own schedule a bit better, so hopefully that means I'll have the time and energy to put more work into this little hobby. At any rate, thanks to all who've enjoyed reading this so far, such as it's been. It had felt like an ambitious undertaking when I started it and there's still much to do before its all over yet. But, one day, it will most certainly be done. Anyway, that's all I've got to say about all that, but something exciting has happened in the meantime too.  Underrail got another DLC! This was a surprise to me as I thought that Stygian were focusing all their attention on the sequel, but there we go. Meet Heavy Duty. I know next to nothing about much of the new content as I haven't played any of Underrail since back when I last updated, but I know a few of the key changes. Firstly, there's a few updates to prexisting items. Like hexogen, the substance we use to make high tier explosives, is now more expensive and metal armors now confer no acid resistances but are much more robust against physical damage. Gorsky is now immune to fear, because he is obviously supposed to be fearless. And there a new seasonal events, who knows what those may be or even if we'll even get to see them? But the main meat of the DLC includes adding in a new skill, heavy guns as well as the new aforementioned heavy guns. So now there are miniguns, light machine guns, and grenade launchers (the grenade launcher is still covered by the normal guns skill). Naturally, none of this will benefit Henrietta since the only machine guns she needs are her fists of fury. But it'll likely mean all new throngs of denizens with some serious firepower to contend with, so that'll be fun to figure out when we stumble upon all that, especially if they're heavily armored by the sounds of it. There is apparently also a new high level side mission, the trailer for it does make it look interesting. No clue how long or difficult it is but I guess we'll find out about it one of these days. I figure we'll be well and truly done with the Expedition DLC area at the very least before we try it out. So look forward to that in the far off future too. Anyway, that's all I've got to say for now. Look forward to the new update either later tonight or tomorrow at the latest, and Merry Christmas.
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Dec 24, 2023 06:24
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Welcome back, I've been trying out my luck at this game, it took me a few thorough rear end-kickings before I got my head around the idea of respecting it and actually planning out fights a bit.
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Dec 24, 2023 20:32
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Chapter 53 - God Rest Ye Smelly Great Rathounds Merry Christmas zoners and pipeworkers everywhere!  Today we set off to wrap up a quest that's been in our quest log for a really long time. (lp hiatus notwithstanding)  Since we're not the most diplomatic or persuasive of characters, we won't be able to get the best outcome for this quest, but oh well.  With any luck, we'll be able to reverse the consequences of this with our future actions.  Or possibly make them even worse! Only time will tell, because I can't be bothered to look up the ending slides right this second.  Anyway, to start this aforementioned quest, we're making our way back to SGS to chat with our lovable big beardy boss Hadrian Tanner.  The quest in question is to resolve the gang problem in the Junk Yard.  That is we have decided to help the Black Eels gang take over the Scrappers turf once and for all.  Dockmaster Silas, the head of the Black Eels, wanted us to run this plan by SGS to see if they can some extra muscle, in exchange for SGS having a greater military presence in Junk Yard.  The advantage of course being it would limit the presence of the Protectorate in Junk Yard to their embassy and slow their encroachment in South Underrail providing SGS with a better foothold with which to negotiate its position as an emerging independent station in the face of the hegemony of the United Stations.  But since we haven't had the opportunity to update Tanner on our status regarding the whole cube recovery project, We will do that first. "I've found Cornell and the Acid Hunters." Tanner leans in curiously. "Excellent. And what of the device? Did you get a hold of it?" "I've tracked the Cube thing to a Coretech research facility in Core City, but Tchortists snatched it before I could get to it." Tanner strokes his beard and responds calmly. "That is unfortunate. This makes your mission all the more important since we cannot afford to leave a powerful artifact in the hands of religious zealots. There's an 'Institute of Tchort' located in the UpperUnderrail; the Tchortists must have taken the Cube there. You know what must be done, Henrietta. Find a way to infiltrate it and retrieve the Cube." Infiltrating the Institute of Tchort will be where the main plot takes us next. It's chock full of side quests so it's worth getting involved in them at some point. We're just about out of base game content. "What do you think that Faceless artifact actually is?" "A weapon... or a part of it. What else could have goaded the Faceless to raise up such force against Core City? I admit that I don't know as much about the Faceless as I would like, though, so I might be wrong." Just what on earth is this cube? Anyway enough of this nation shattering artifact, we've got petty gang wars to get involved in. "There's a showdown of gangs about to happen in the Junkyard and the Black Eels want our help." Explain the situation. Tanner listens to you calmly. After you're finished he runs his hand once over his beard before responding. "I wasn't aware that the tensions have escalated that far. This is quite a serious matter. We'll need to assemble the council for this. Follow me." Follow him.  "I vote for staying out of this whole situation. First of all, we don't know the Protectorate's position on all of this, and running the risk of provoking them for some... gangsters seems irresponsible to me, and will do this station no good. This way, if we do nothing, we can continue our trade and integration in the United Stations, which I believe is the more desirable option."Vera, naturally wants to remain on good terms with the United Stations. "Vera, I understand you perfectly, but I must disagree with putting the United Stations on such a high pedestal. No matter what we do, we have no guarantee that the Protectorate won't eventually take over whole of Junkyard." "At least most of the folks there would celebrate bein' free of brutal gangs, so there's that." "That may be true, but that still doesn't change the fact that Protectorate's ultimate intentions are unknown to us. We're dealing with speculations here, and basing important decisions on speculations is unwise." "Hear me out, please: If we intervene and help some lowlifes kill each other, think of the message we could be sending to the United Stations. Just as you said right now about them conquering their way toward us, they might too feel threatened by our movements; they could see us as being conquerors. And then what?" "Excuse me, Vera, but I never uttered the word 'conquering.' I am merely expressing my concerns. You know I care only for what is best for this station and its residents. Underrail Protectorate is a powerful force and shouldn't be taken lightly." "It's such a darn pity Gorsky ain't here. I'm sure the conversation would've went a whole lot different."He laughs.If we had initiated this quest before we collected the drill parts in Junk Yard wayyy back before the Faceless attacked Core City, Gorsky would also be present at this meeting. Given his love of the Protectorate, you can generally guess his stance on SGS' involvement in this. "Gorsky's opinion would surely be valued here. What about you Ezra, what is on your mind?" Ezra calmly answers the question. "I have nothing of significance to add to this discussion."Good input Ezra, thanks for nothing. "And how about you, Henrietta? What do you think?"Now it's probably in our best interests to keep the protectorate out of Junk Yard, especially since we've just buddied up with the Free Drone and all too. So we'll give our best reasoning a go. (Persuade) "I say we side with the Black Eels... for now. If we decide to join the United Stations later, we'll do that from a more advantageous position."I should also point out here, that despite the advantageous position of the Scrappers in Junk Yard, they are very much the underdogs in this conflict. We won't be seeing it just yet, but the Black Eels reach extend much further than merely the Junk Yard docks, they're a fairly sizable gang. "That might be the wisest course of action." So I think a small bit of dialogue might have been lost there. Basically Tanner tells us to get some rest and they convene their decision later. So we just have to head back to Tanner from our bedroom to learn if we were successful in persuading the council to act in accordance with our wishes.  "No, there's little we can accomplish at this point. You should forget about this and carry on with your other tasks."And we weren't successful. Go figure. Oh well, that means the only real course of action, besides siding with the Scrappers, will be to get the Protectorate to help out. We don't really even wanna side with the Scrappers, like I said the Black Eels have far greater reach in this game. At any rate, the Scrappers leader has something of ours we want back.  So we're off to Junk Yard to persuade the Protectorate to act in their own interests. I'm unsure if there's an alternative way of getting SGS to help out the Eels, there usually is alternative approaches to these things. Ah well.  But first we drop by Quinton to pick up some supplies. If you will recall we asked him to set up Dude with various supplies he'll need to make the Juice. Our all powerful inter-dimensional beverage of choice. Oh, yes. Tell me about it. "He arrived here not too long after you and I spoke. Can't say he had quite a... wholesome appearance, but he was polite. We... had a bit of an argument over him wanting to pay me in brew, but we sorted that out somehow. However, what I found most baffling was his departure. After picking up the package he went inside the storage room. I saw him and yelled to him that is not where the elevator is, but he still went inside. Bret and I checked the storage room, but he wasn't there." A bit of a clue as to where to find the rift for SGS, although we've already found it. "He was, uh..." "He was pulling a prank on us. Must've. There is no other exit from that room. Your friend surely is... odd." "Uh, yes, prank. Dude's a prankster at heart, yes, ha-ha-ha. Anyway, there was something I wanted to ask you..."No one must ever know of our teleportation secrets. No one. Except the guys at Oculus I guess, they seem cool. "Okay." "Later."  Anyway we stealth and steal some lake poppies growing in the hydroponics pools.  That way we can make out own morphine.  And we go retrieve some red dream mushrooms we've been hoarding up until this point.  So we can extract their precious Gyromitrin. And in doing so we can combine this with morphine and mushroom brew to make our own Juice, assuming we have the necessary biology/chemistry skill. It's been a few months so I forget if we're good enough to do that or not...  Rather than waste our Juice supplies, or pay for the ferry, we hoof it back to Junk Yard on foot.   Aah of course, we were missing one last ingredient, psi extract from mindshrooms!  Now we can restock on The Juice. Can never have enough of this stuff. Even if it is supposedly carcinogenic.  Anyway, before we carry on with this gang stuff, let's turn in that quest for the Free Drones. Y'know, the one where we massacred a bunch of Protectorate and some ambassador guy the was visiting Crossroad Station?  "Thank you, thank you. I love you all." Bow down. She laughs. "Well done! Well done! You've proven to us that you are willing and worthy of becoming a part of our family. We don't have riches, we don't have power and we have to live in constant danger. But we have humanity, we have honesty and we have the will to send the evil Protectorate into oblivion! And we will do it, together. Now it's time to meet the rest of the family. I want you to go to the Free Drones base in the under-passages. The simplest way to explain how to get there is to find the under-passages entrance just south of Rail Crossing, then go west and you'll come up to a locked door with an intercom next to it. Use the intercom; the password is 'delectable.'" "Got it. 'Delectable.'"Dealing with the Free Drones shenanigans will be our next point of interest after we're done here. "Great! Just be careful, the under-passages are full of Lurkers. I gotta move. Do you have any questions before we depart?" "You mentioned Lurkers. What can you tell me about them?" "Lurkers... They are horrible creatures! They are our neighbours in the under-passages, a gang of demented killers who'll cut up anyone who even dares breathe in their presence. The only good thing is that everyone knows they dwell in the passages, thus making it a good hiding place from the Protectorate. Of course, living that close to Lurker central is not safe at all, usually feels like a stalactite is hanging over your head, but nothing is perfect in life." "I never learned your name." "It's Sarah... Sarah Ailene. Nice to meet you." She smiles. "What are these 'underpassages?'" "Under-passages are a connected set of passages just below the metro level. They connect several major locations across Lower Underrail, like Core City, Rail Crossing, GMS and such. Those passages used to be a very, very convenient way of going around, but then the Lurkers thought it'd make a nice slaughterhouse. Now, only the most desperate go through there. And us, which is the same, in a way."Despite my best efforts in previous updates, we never actually killed all of the Lurkers or saw all of the underpassages, there's a few extra areas we need to check out down there at some point. "Why do the Free Drones have a base in the under-passages?" "It's simple: The passages are extremely dangerous because of the Lurkers, so it's the best place for us to hide from the Protectorate.Plus, the narrow hallways are easy to defend, negating the numerical advantage Protectorate would surely have over us if they were to try flushing us out of there. I know, I know, it's not the best place to live in, but that's what we are stuck with. Could be worse." "I have no further questions." "In that case, good luck, sister. I'd lead you there, but I have some important business here. Goodbye and stay free." "Stay free." And back to the task at hand.  We stop by Fixer, the medical supplies merchant outside the Protectorate Embassy and we find he's got the blueprints for Aegis, nice.  I forget if we've ever found any Aegis in the past, but Aegis is like a weaker yet safer form of morphine in this game. That is to say is reduces all damage by 15% for 8 turns in combat which is far less than morphine which reduces damage by 50% for 3 turns, but unlike morphine it has no side effects. Morphine removes and extra half of your missing health worth of damage once it wears off, meaning if you only have 1/3 of your health or less then you'll die when it wears off. So yeah, a much nicer variant in many respects. Unfortunately, it requires gizzard enzymes to make, which are difficult to source, since we'll have to hunt those tiny boring worms in the Foundry mines as well as a sizable investment of 60 Biology to extract it and we're not quite there yet. There are other ways to get these, but they're very much a late game item.  At any rate, we're off too say hi to the ambassador yet again.   "Black Eels are preparing to move against the Scrappers and they are asking for your support." The ambassador seems somewhat alarmed. "We expected this to happen eventually, but not this soon. The tension between these two... factions has been steadily growing. We will aid them, but in turn they will have to allow us to have some military presence on both the docks and the Old Junkyard gate. Let me know if these terms are acceptable." Hopefully our newfound friends in the Free Drones don't cause us issues in long run. Anyway back to Silas to let him know the good news.  "United Stations and the Protectorate have agreed to help if you agree to allow them to hold some military presence on the docks and at the Old Junkyard gate." "No surprise there. They've been tryin' to gain additional ground here ever since the embassy opened. Fine, I'll let them post a soldier or two." "Alright, I'll let them know." Sigh, was this backtracking really necessary game?   "Silas has agreed to your terms." He nods. "We will send an agent to coordinate battle plans." I'm sure this extra back and forth could really have been removed. Ah well.  "Now it's time to plant the explosives. Colton's got them ready. Take the explosives and plant them in the cavern Blaine told you about. Once we're ready to move out we'll detonate it remotely. Let me know when it's in place." "I'll be leaving now." So now we just have to put in place explosive ambush.    So it's back to the old Depot for us.  Plus is nice and quiet since we last visited. Save for the occasional landmine we failed to tread on last time.  After some brief vent crawling, we find ourselves back in the tiny little cavern where the explosives have to be placed.  But first we attempt to exact vengeance on the first crawler we ever stumbled across.  As annoying as these things will ever remain for us. If we get the drop on them, we sure can smash crawlers to pieces now.   And that's that.     "The explosives are in place." "Excellent, we're ready to move out then. Grab all the gear you need and let me know when you're ready. Make sure to bring some meds - this could get ugly."No turning back now, let's start this fight. "I'm ready. Let's get this show on the road." He nods. "Alright, people! Time to move out! Your Protectorate soldiers will be attackin' from the north, through the Old Junkyard, while me and my boys will hit the front. Where do you wanna go?"We'll stick with the Eels, partly because we want to ensure nothing happens to Silas, but also because we really don't care what happens to the proctorate backup guys. "I'll hit the front with you guys." "Good. We'll be glad to have you. Now let's go."  Okay, so welcome to the gang showdown.  We are absurdly overlevelled for this mission at this point. I wanted to try and do it late in the game to see if we couldn't raise out persuasion skill without investing any points into it, but that'd require us to find a leprechaun and having him make us a really nice pair of shoes. No really, it's a random seasonal event that occurs on St Patrick's Day. At any rate, I believe it would also require some persuasion to get him to do that. Alternative we can make some very fancy attire out of an enemy we can meet in Expedition, but eh, we probably need all the XP we can get before we head over there.  Anyway, this is one of the few really big fights in Underrail.  Much of the combat in underrail is usually pretty swift and brutal, and is usually over in a few turns. Which is nice and makes for good turn based combat encounters. Long combat tends to drag otherwise.  Because there's so many actors in this fight, it tends to be one of the more tedious encounters. It's not too bad I guess, but there's more delay to it than most fights for sure.  There's also the risk that Silas will be killed, which probably wouldn't bode well for use getting paid for this either. Which would suck, but he's relatively well protected and usually I end this fight with few causalities on the eels side of things.  If SGS had helped out there would be a few of the named NPC's who don't do all that much back at the station helping out in this fight too, they will be gone for good if they die too. Not that it matter too much from a rewards perspective, you cold calculating RPG player you.    But yes, this fight is piece of piss and Eddy will likely be shot to death by the flanking protectorate before we get a change to punch him ourselves.       We make sure to kill the unarmed members who flee from us for some reason.  And Gort too, farewell noble scrap merchant. A shame we'll lose access to his inventory of hexogen and TNT but ah well, what can you do?      And with this last straggler, the fight is over.  And yes it looks like the protectorate had indeed killed Eddy first.   Now we get free reign to loot every inch of this depot.   Most importantly we retrieve the mysterious disk item we gave to Eddy way back in the day. This object is surprisingly important. Kind of like the Bronze Sphere in Planescape: Torment. Well maybe not quite as important as that...   To the victor goes the mindshrooms.  Now we just need to chat with Silas and we can cross this ancient quest off of our list.  "We couldn't have done this without your help, Henrietta. You are an ally of the Black Eels now. So when you're out there, out there on the streets, know that we've got your back. Here." He hands you 700 stygian coins "It's your share of the money we got from the Scrappers."And we're even filthier rich than we were before.   And with that we'll shortcut our way to the free drones base.    Which is located behind this mysterious door with an intercom that we found many an update ago. But we'll check that out, next time.
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Dec 24, 2023 20:35
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Chapter 54 - Please Don't Go, The Drone Need You, They Look Up to You. Alright, time to meet the Free Drones properly.    Oh look, a laser dog! "Who's a good doggie? Are you? Yes you are, yes you are! Come 'ere!" The dog observes you for several seconds before taking a few steps forward, each step more confident than the last. Its eyes are still fixed on you, however, but the feeling of threat has now greatly diminished. In fact, you get the impression that it was never really present, that it was simply a misinterpretation on your part. And as a subtle wag of the dog's tail reinforces your thoughts, all your worries disappear. Suddenly, you hear a male voice in the distance. "Laser! Come here, boy!"Well at least it's not another Laser cat.   "What can you tell me about Laser?" "Laser is an artificially engineered canine assassin, designed and manufactured by Biocorp in their K-9 Plant in Deep Caverns. Built to fight with supercanine speed, reflexes and intelligence unmatched by any other living dog, he is undeniably the greatest, the best... the... Ah, I've lost inspiration." He laughs. "Laser is my dog, and he's made of flesh, don't worry. I brought him here when he was just a puppy, about a year and a half ago. Found him sleeping in some trash, all skinny and dirty, full of fleas. He's a very smart pooch... but a stupidly fast one, hence his name." He laughs. "I just love him, he truly is a man's best friend. My best friend."The Free Drones are not a high tech organization by any stretch. "Why did you join the Free Drones?" "Hmmm, I can't remember the exact moment when it clicked in my head, but say... two-three years ago I realized where the world was headed to... I learned more about the United Stations, Underrail Protectorate... I didn't like it, any of it. I started hearing more and more bad stories about those tyrants, and some of them I had the misfortune of confirming with my own eyes. I got angry. Really, really angry. Was I to allow these evil men, these tyrants, to oppress us? No. I was not! When I came here, I took a vow: I will fight till death to rid this world of Protectorate, to stop the metal boots from stomping all over us, and to kick some bloody Cans outta Underrail for good. Yeah! For Freedom!"We'll never really truly know how right Hutch is here. But he is certainly right about the Protectorate, at least on some level. If we were to have joined the Protectorate instead, certain individuals higher up in the chain of command than our superiors in that organization would assume control and force us to commit atrocities in effort to crush the Free Drones. I may elaborate on this further. "What can you tell me about the Free Drones base?" "I can start with the basic layout and inhabitants. As soon as you get through the passage behind us you'll run straight into Becket, our supplier. You can get a lot of good stuff from him, but more about that later. A bit further to the left is our medical office. Sadly, Doctor Palin was fatally injured some time ago, so the office is closed for now. Straight ahead is Julia Darling who feeds our poor and hungry stomachs, fueling our bodies to fight the Cans. Our leaders, Trenton and Bate, are to the right from the entrance, in the war room. And, at the... let's see, um, north turn you go to the sleeping... section, however you wanna call it. Oh, and the toilet is just opposite of the medical office; that's important to know, trust me. We keep a lantern just outside the 'door', because it's a bit too dark once you go in to... ehem, do your business. That's the basic layout. You'll find your way easily, I'm sure."All in all the Free Drones base is pretty tiny, but it just a hidey hole of a single terrorist cell, so I guess we shouldn't expect all that much. What can you tell me about the Lurkers? "Lowlife trash who reside in the under-passage and kill people. I don't see anything else in what they do but senseless killing. Derailed bastards. They disgust me. If there's anything else I hate more than the Cans, it's those beasts."Not sure why I bother asking people about Lurkers anymore. I'll probably stop doing that. "Who came up with the mushroom cake song?" "It was Sarah, the girl who contacted you about joining us. Ahh, I used to bring her mushroom cakes, constantly bugging Darling to make them so that I can give them to Sarah. So, as a little joke, we use it as a door pass. 'Delectable' used to be 'delicious,' but since we were worried it was a bit too easy to figure out, we changed it." "You and Sarah are in some sort of relationship?" "I really don't know where you got that idea that the most perfect woman and I are together in a long and strong relationship." He sighs. "We're so far away right now..."They'll be together again shortly. "What can you tell me about Trenton?" "He's one of the Free Drones leaders, and personally, a man I truly and greatly admire. He has a precise, military oriented mind that works non-stop trying to figure out a way to... to outsmart the Cans. We have less fighters and much worse equipment and despite all that, when Corben comes up with a genius plan, when his gears start turning, he is able to turn switch the tracks into our favor. Dreads mean nothing when we've got Trenton." He laughs. "When it comes to socializing, on the other hand, he can be too stiff, too direct at times, and, hell, even too honest... But I respect that, because I'm sure he is doing what's best for us all. Death to Protectorate and United Stations!" "What can you tell me about Bate?" "Alvin Bate is a man who had proven to us - on multiple occasions - that he doesn't think he's above anyone of us here, despite being one of the leaders. He speaks to us like we're his equals, and, heh, he would often share his stories with us, give us advice and even get drunk with some of the guys when time allows it. I don't drink alcohol myself, so I never had that pleasure of getting wasted with Alvin, but I'm sure it would be an honor. Alcohol just... just isn't for me." He makes a grimace.We could ask him and everyone else here for that matter about their opinion on everyone else here. In the interest of time and sanity, I'll avoid going through every single permutation of this. We aren't missing all that much in doing this. "Nice talking to ya, see you later." "Stay cool; stay free" On to the base proper.  The base is only slightly better looking than one of the Lurker Dens. There's a lot of named NPCs milling about this place. Most of them don't have anything to say though.  Becket here is the supplier.   "I sell all sorts of stuff - good stuff, so feel free to spend some charons!" He laughs. [Mercantile] "Hey, Becket, where do you keep the good stuff? Don't try to tell me that a guy like yourself doesn't have something on the side, waiting for the right buyer."We're merchant savvy enough to see Becket's extra inventory. He laughs. "You clever bastard, you sure got the nose for these things, eh? I've the stuff you want right 'ere."The Free Drones supply store is much more limited and poorer in quality than the Protectorate supply store by quite a margin. It does have a few nice things in it that we want however. Also the protectorate supply store only deal in United Stations Dollars which are a particularly rare currency outside of what you get paid by the Protectorate which does limit your purchasing power further, whereas the Free Drones base uses good ol' Charons. That being said, it is often wise to choose which of these two factions you want to join based on the kind of equipment they sell. If you're wise enough to make your own equipment and are a guns and or heavy armor sort of player, you'll be hard pressed to find higher quality materials outside of the base game.  They're selling the Jumping Bean combat drug that's main use is giving a few extra turns of movement during combat thus providing a little bit of breathing room. The extra Dodge and Evasion is nice but never super important most of the time, certainly not in our case.  Beckett also sells nail bombs which are the one item which is exclusive for those who join the Free Drones. They pretty decent too and they're both incredibly good for our build and the primary reason we really wanted to sign on with these guys from a mechanics perspective. Each grenade hits everyone in the blast radius with 4-8 nails that all do a relatively minor amount of damage, but each nail has a 50% chance of bleed and each bleed has a further 35% chance of causing an infected wound. Add to that we have the trait Taste for Blood which increases our melee damage by 5% for every bleeding wound and the fact that we favor combat gloves that cause further bleeding, then we're really taking our damage to the next level. We're basically one combat trait away from fully realizing our combat potential, but the nail bombs round out this character nicely. Short of a few equipment upgrades, we're almost as deadly as we'll ever need to be.  We buy up any and all Nail Bombs we can. They're going to come in useful.   In one of the back rooms we discover a key card to the front door. Not particularly useful to us since we can just come and go as we please from now on. It would be super important if we were in the Protectorate though. If we had, we'd be given a military rank and be signed on as a special agent. After completing all of the various missions set for us, an elite Death Squad called the Chemical Assault Unit (CAU) will show up to take command of the operation. They'll get us to collect some long lost mutagen canister and use it to gas this very base with via some vents. You end up getting trapped in the base once you release the canister and have to fight your way out whilst the base start to fill up with the gas and every member of the free drone that touches the cloud will eventually transform into a large mutant. It's a pretty mad dash of a fight and it can go very wrong very quickly. If you do make it out alive, you get a very jokey "I thought you were dead!" from the CAU and then they give you some CAU armor of your very own, so you. It goes very well with chemical weapons builds. In the ending slides, your character is haunted by what they did for the rest of their life, so that's good. Oh, and if you happen to touch that gas at any point during the mission yourself... well... that's a story for another time.  We grab our first Protectorate Can oddity, little tin cans dressed to look like a protectorate soldier filled with free drone propaganda.  In the northern part of the base is a small bar with very slavic man standing near the counter.  "I'm Henrietta. Nice to meet you as well." "Henrietta? Eh, it very, how you say.... errrr, bombastic name. It pops out like eyes from a cave mouse when you squeeze him too hard. Ehehe. Anyway, my name Yerslovekzdinianschnik Slavorad Kokoschka. Everyone here think it difficult to pronounce so they call me just Kokoschka, but you should try my brother Babuschkomoranznohoho name. It make your mouth, how we say, go hurt."People in the know about slavic languages, please feel free to enlighten us on any hidden jokes here. "Nice to meet you Yarsl... Yerslokev..." "Look, you can't say it. Ehehe. Just try with me: Yerslovekzdinianschnik, Yerslovekzdinianschnik, Yerslovekzdinianschnik. Oh, your mouth don't work. You will just have to call me Kokoschka then, like everyone else around here. So, what we talk about?" "Where are you from, Kokoschka?" "I come from far, far, far west, from Fatherland. There is place there called Chniokovo Ludilo, it very far away. It good to live, not much bandits around to destroy you, and even if some want to attack - we break them in four! That's how we say in Chniokovo Ludilo - errr, break in four! Ehehe. My father..." He sighs. "He very sad when I left. He say to me, 'Zarznkalom bulat drobozpol chtekovina ih bre volemto golzmnomno schperidanko.' And I say to him, 'Tata, pregoznal zrnornznokpa brdalpes?' Then he say to me: 'Ih bre! Chtogodi pandrkne sin schtopita more gumadron, i prdoslavitche knrzozrn!' And I say to him, 'Chto ti osch preslovoka zdeno slobodnika.' Then my mama said, 'Pragonosko te snimzolen grvoplasticsk schnoschnosch i prevobre.' And then I left home and come here. It difficult for me, you know what I mean?"So yes, Kokoschka here is living proof that our little jaunt into the grey army base wasn't a fantastic hallucination after all and Fatherland is a very real place after all. Not that we ever thought it wasn't real of course. Hey, do you recognize this? Show him one zlatortiya bill. He looks at the bill and responds with delight in his eyes. "Err, it zlatortiya, that the money we use in Fatherland!" He points his finger to the face depicted on the bill. "Look, this is Nadbojvod Jarkov Mochnik, our leader, or how you say - the alpha male of the house, ehehe. Oh, Nadbojvod ishis title - it better title than military general, much better. General is like bojvod, while something like overgeneral is like nadbojvod. But ours would still be very much so better, yes, ehehe. Where you find this money?" "I acquired them during a short visit... um, to your fatherland." "You visited my home? But why?" "I went through a reality rift with my drunken friend and we ended up there." "Rift? That like train. You were drunk too?" "Yes""Ehehe. Zplno! Good. If you spend time in Fatherland drunk, then that means you had good time and that you a real man, real chovek. Even if you are not man, a chovek, but woman, a zhena. Ehehehe. That much great achievement - to be like man. But not all women should be like a man, or else you become like Schulanka, our right neighbor. She too much like man." He shrugs. "Anyway, where can I exchange this money for some charons? Do you know anyone who could do that for me? Could you do it?" "Well... I can help you. I will return to Fatherland one day, after I break my enemies in four here, so I will use money. How much do you have?" "I am a millionaire!" "Ehehe, that is very little money. You are not like million-money people in South Underrail. Here, million coins - live like Nadbojvod himself. Better. In Fatherland - live like zonemen from Core City. If you have quadrillion - then you, how we say, can eat whole pigs, drink kzozel until your belly pop, buy clothes that looks good on a chovek, eat some more whole pigs, stain clothes with pig smear by accident, have a maid wash it - have a maid - and you will still have enough money left to drive in the train until you reach your house from the other side. That is when you rich, ehehe. Let me calculate in my head... one coin is twenty thousand... yes... Okay, I have about one hundred and fifty coins I could exchange. I will sell you one coin for two zlatortiya bills. That is twenty thousand zlatortiyas. For five."So yes, one of the other perks of joining the Free Drones is it gives you access to the only man in Underrail able to exchange your worthless Fatherland funbucks into usable currency, at a fairly extortionate rate. Well it would be if Zlatortiya was in any way worth spending. It's more just free money at this point. At any rate we can haggle him down to a better exchange rate also. [Mercantile] "Only one hundred fifty? That amount is barely worth the trouble." "But I need some coins while I am here. I can't give all coins to you, even though I like you." "Not all of them, of course, but I'd be pleased if you could set aside, say, a hundred charons more for me." "Well... No, no. Sorry. I cannot. It too will make my coin man-purse too light. Sorry. I like you, but sorry."Well we would be able to if our mercantile was better. We should probably invest a little more into that at some point. "Here's two hundred bills for one hundred charons." Give him 200 zlatortiya bills.Well free money is free money I guess. "Here you go." He hands you your charons. "Tell me about your fatherland." "Fatherland is one, how you say, very much great place. It west of here, far away. It more open caves and space, not so much metro and caves tighter than Ulyuk Ndzslav's pants, and there many places in it, like my place, Chniokovo Ludilo, but also Drznavgrad - capital, Gudrava Poschkontnitza, Plop and Tuchuznt. We have trains too, but here rail is life, while in Fatherland rail is very, very important, but still means of transportation and is not life. Here people derailed, there people crazy - mad, cuckoo. You know what I mean? And one thing I notice here is we have Fatherland, but you don't have South Underrail. Errr, to us Fatherland is every - how you say - every station, every man and all land that is ours. All that is Fatherland - ours. Here, everyone is for himself, his family or his group, but never whole South Underrail. You don't here someone yell "For South Underrail, zdrganlpno!" You understand? You might say for Free Drones, for Core City or Camp Hatathor, but never South Underrail. You live in South Underrail, but South Underrail does not live in you. I would fight for Fatherland, but you people see South Underrail just as land you live in. It hard to explain, errr, it very much hard as nails to explain. But, that is why we have big army, united army, to defend Fatherland. And a great leader, because a good leader is the best way to run, errr, how you say - society, while bad leader is the worst. Ne zplno."Kokoschka also never shuts up. "What can you tell me about your fatherland's military?" Our army strong, very much to the best strong. It contains many men, all well trained and ready to break in four, ehehe. I also served in our great army, and fought. Not great enemy armies of past, no, but bandits and evil men coming from east - from here, gudravtzi plmazni..." He mutters the rest to himself. "And those barbar-men from southwest, gudravtzi neoklkopevani... Our army keeps Fatherland safe, but scum from all around sometimes sneaks in more and more and threaten our freedom." "So I suspect you have have a lot of military bases there?" "Yes, many. I served in Tratischevo, south of Brazgrzna and just northeast of Chopava Baba. It was, how we say, slavno, which means so-good-you-want-to-celebrate-it-from-time-to-time-by-making-big-feast. Yes. But there are many other bases of army. I remember... in Tratischevo, there was fat cook woman that made best czernina I ever eat in life. Even my mama - mother, or my matoramama - grandmother, they don't make that good czernina. Sadly no." "That rifle of yours..." "My puschka? That, errr: Ah-Ka-Eeks - or how I call it - Ahka It very old rifle, from distant past. I, how you say, inherit it from my grandfather, who got it from his father, who stole it from his father, who was keeping it locked away from his senile father named Kvaromir, who also got it from his father, who found it in a hole next to a dead neighbor. This puschka, it... errr, how you say, killed many people to death. It good puschka, yes."So yes as you might guess, Kokoschka has a unique assault rifle, the AKX which is based on the real world AKM. It's not a particularly hard hitting weapon but it has two key advantages. It that is has infinite durability, and while it is equipped it boosts resolve by 15%. Resolve being the stat which resists thought control based psi damage. This is kind of impressive, since there are remarkably few ways beyond sinking points into your Willpower score that are capable of positively improving resolve in this game. Humorously, if you get this gun refurbished it will get a small damage boost like other refurbished guns, but it will lose it's rugged charm and therefore the resolve bonus will be lost too. Nobody's impressed with a shiny new AK. "Wanna trade it for something?" "But I need my Ahka! To ra-ta-ta-ta-ta evil people! Big battles coming up! Later... maybe I let you touch it later. But no trade. Trade, never."Minsc here won't give up his AK so easily. Ah well we aren't much in the market for guns anyway, resolve bonuses or not. "Why did you join the Free Drones?" "I heard great struggle here. How you say, very powerful evil of great power threatens to destroy Underrail. And they could then get to us! Men who follow this evil, I heard they have big claws like my first mother-in-law sharp teeth like my second mother-in-law, and smell what is the word, ah... can't remember the word at this moment of inspirational speech." "Are you talking about the Protectorate?" "No, not protect - destroy. You know, female friend, I very angry when I heard. Very angry, suntze mu satrem! How you say - blow up of anger. I had to join Free Drones to help them. My heart is in the right place." "Tell me more about Nadbojvod Mochnik." "He man like every man should be. He has stayed with same woman even though he could have every one of them; has many, many little Mochniks, so his strong bloodline will not die; cherishes our tradition, culture and faith, and is domachin - a great hospitable homeowner. It very important in Fatherland. We have big army, very big army - but he never send us to attack other, we only defend from evil, yes. Many want to destroy us, but we break them in four! Evil army, bandit, barbar-men or animal - we break them all in four. He best leader! And he has mustache that throw great shadows - like a real man should. He is stern but fair, like a father. He tells us what must be done, and we all know our place, women too, but we are free. More free than Free Drones, who get shot by everyone, very evil or not very evil. And we have everything we need: family, food, home and good life. We, we have our land - our Fatherland, and we have it because of Nadbojvod, yes. He great!" "Did you ever see him in person?" "Of course. His brother-by-aunt Opeslav Drmni is my family's above neighbor - you know, living above us - so Nadbojvod often comes to Chniokovo Ludilo for feast or just visit. I feel pride for Fatherland every time I see him. Even now, as I remember him... it makes, how you say, feeling of Fatherland love grow in me - I fatheriotic. Nadbojvod once shook my hand even! Oh, that day I will never forget. Only if bullet blow my head to, as you say, muck." "What can you tell me about this place?" "I come here several months ago to fight Free Drones. I mean, for Free Drones. Ehehe, I got confused, it have totally different meaning when you say it like I say it the first time. People here, how you say, mighty warriors, even women! I surprised. In Chniokovo Ludilo women not fight Women clean, cook, wash our feet and shut up when we tell them. Here they talk when they like, it crazy! It derailed! I never had chance to ride into battle yet, but when I do I'll break enemies in four. Krasnoboschko! Ehehe. Until then, I make friends here. I make many okay friends, some very bad friends who put stuff in my food so I had to spend three hours squatting in toilet, and one very most best friend: Julia my Darling." "What can you tell me about the Lurkers?" "When I first come here, I met one Lurkers. He very ugly, say he kill me with knife. But I kill him, I break him in four. He was a schklopocya, how we say. It means 'someone-who-is-so-weak-he-can-be-knocked-over-by-just-blowing-some-air-from-mouth-into-his-face.' But, not all Lurkers weak. Others terrible, how you say, monsters. Kill people and cut them into tiny, tiny, tiny pieces of flesh. I don't want meet another one - one is enough."Lurkers are bad. Do you realise this now? "I'd like to ask you about the people here." "I answer with gladness." "What can you tell me about Darling?""She is my very most best friend. She very good woman, she work good, she very beautiful, oh she is! She work over there in, how you say, area of eating, and I come and look at her, talk to her, carry heavy stuff that break my spine for her... Ah, women. Listen, I tell you a secret, Henrietta, but you don't tell no one, okay? I been... errr, married six times so far, and if I marry for seventh time, I would like it to be Julia my Darling. I love her... I would kill a grizozirg - the most greatest of great beasts, grrr kill it with my bare hands for her if, how you say, the need is necessary. Listen, you don't say this to anyone or I get very mad, okay? We in deal?" "What can you tell me about Becket?" "Becket very cool, he call me bastard when he met me. I become offended, how you say. 'Why you call me bastard?' I ask." He smiles, ehehe, but I don't find joke funny. He tells me he calls everyone bastard and it is a joke only! Ehehe, I start to laugh so much I had to use toilet. Once I met him better, I see he cool. Even if he calls me bastard." "What can you tell me about Trenton?" "Trenton one of our leaders. He very serious, very. I once call him bastard, like Becket calls me, but he just look at me with not smiling face. Later my Darling tell me he got called from North Underrail and they tell him he do bad, so that's why he angry. Why he always not funny? Man can't make joke with him. But, he good leader, remind me of a father's father's leader from Chniokovo Ludilo, Salamchugar Bolyezniprznov III. He also good leader and not funny." "What can you tell me about Bate?" "I think Bate man very good chovek. He is... errr, good at leading as well as drinking. George tell me about how they sit down and get drunk like blazpzlony. Ehehe. He more fun than Trenton, Trenton too serious. Bate knows to have fun, unlike Trenton who too serious. Unlike Bate. Ehehe." "Bye, Kokoschka." "Do zdelovoznia... errr, I mean goodbye."Phew that was a lot of words that said very little. I know I said we weren't gonna ask too many questions about others here, we do want to check what people know about the leaders of the Free Drones though. There'll be reason for this for later.   Also standing near the bar is somebody familiar to us.(Pay no attention to that cat portrait!)  "Nice to see you're alive and well." "Thanks. Nice to see you too. I finally have a chance to thank you for helpin' me, and yeah... I might've forgotten your name. I can't remember if you even mentioned it. Yeah, that was a pretty fast-paced day."It's Maura, the lady we busted out of the Protectorate embassy way back in our early days. When Abram was being all vague and paying us good money. I don't think we ever quite learn why Abram wanted us to break her out of there. I mean given the nature of the quest I'm almost convinced that Abrams quests were originally supposed to tie him in as an agent of Free Drones originally and then they came up with the idea of Oculus later. But I dunno, maybe Maura is also an Oculus agent. I guess we'll never know. Anyway, Maura doesn't seem to remember who we are so we'll remind her the only way we know how. Some people call me Henrietta, but other call me - Invictus! Raise our fist in the air She pauses as she observes you. A second later, she points her finger at you. "I dig. Yeah, I dig! You do look like the Invictus! The resemblance is... yeah, sis." No, I am the Invictus! "Now that I think about it some more, you even sound like the Invictus! That's some good impersonation. Look... As a little thank-you for savin' me from the Cans, I pulled a favor to get you some equipment for free. Go talk to Becket, our supply man. You'll find him near the entrance."Well rude of her not to recognize true greatness. But hey freeish stuff I guess. So, why were you captured by the Protectorate? "In short - I was an idiot. I wasn't careful and that's why I got busted." What do you mean? "Man, I was supposed to get some stuff from our Junkyard hideout. It's somethin' I do all the time, but this time I had some... hackin' equipment and stuff with me. Which was used to mess with the embassy's network. Which forced the Cans to keep their eyes peeled and on their toes. So I came along, and a handsome brainwashed Protectorate piece of trash caught me red-handed. I told them nuthin', just for the record. She laughs. You know the rest."Well except for the part where Abram wanted to save you for some reason. "What can you tell me about Kokoschka?" "He very fine man." She laughs. "I envy him, I really do. He's so innocent and naive! He doesn't know why we fight or who we fight, he just wants to fight for what he thinks is right. In his mind, everything is simple, while I've lost so much sleep over the years, as most of us have. I have yet to see him miss his 'to get much rest' ten-hour sleep." She laughs. "As soon as his head touches the pillow, he's in dream land. Legend."Well good to know she's alright at least. "Bye Maura." Next up is Darling the cook. She appears to be a psionic too.  We won't bother with any small talk with her yet. We'll just see what she's got to eat. "Well, my stomach is growling..." Nothing too fancy, although some spicy Hardcore chips are always nice for us unarmed punching types. Giving an extra 5% crit chance is probably worth the trade off of increased 2% crit chance on us, since, generally, we want to strike first and have fights to end in one round anyway. She also sells a decent amount of mushroom brew, which we could potentially use to make more Juice.  Not much else going on round here except people giving barks of solidarity.   Rocksteady is one of the tankier free drones. He has nothing much to say to us, but he be a prime target were he on the other side of a fight for us.   In the back we've got some shabby looking sleeping quarters.  And this storage room would serve as the entrance to the base if we were assaulting it.  Thanks to that windbag Kokoschka, this chapter is running overlong, so I'm gonna cut it in half and end it here for now. Next time we'll meet the higher ups and take on our first mission. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Dec 27, 2023 |
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Dec 26, 2023 19:29
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Portrait missing / mismatch around here, I think:quote:
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Dec 27, 2023 13:49
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SIGSEGV posted:Portrait missing / mismatch around here, I think: Ah looks like some of kokoschkas dialogue ran on into henriettas, cheers.
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Dec 27, 2023 18:49
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Chapter 55 - Errand Work Next door is the free drones planning room, where the higher ups plot their schemes.  So we accidentally committed a bit of a sequence break in Trenton's dialogue since he's in the habit of initiating conversations before we can. And also back when hit the main bulk of the Lurkers many moons ago, we inadvertently rescued a bunch of free drones. "I've arranged with Becket to give you a reward, go see him, he has it ready."So now our freeish reward from Beckett just doubled. "What can you tell me about the Free Drones?" "The Free Drones are an anarchist movement founded by Wallace 'Steel' Cholokashvilli some twelve years ago. The term anarchy is often misinterpreted, because it is commonly associated with chaos and senseless violence. In truth, anarchist philosophy simply advocates that the people should be governed only by themselves and not by a different, usually corrupt and oppressive entity. Of course, because of the tyrannical and brutal nature of the Underrail Protectorate, violence is necessary if we want to remain free. That's how propaganda against us actually works, especially here in the South: The Cans claim that we are just another group of bandits comparable to the likes of Ironheads, and fabricate and spread our supposed acts of terror and chaos. It's pure propaganda, Henrietta, but the real truth is on our side."Dunno if the free drones are going about this the right way necessarily, but yeah the protectorate are definitely ruthless and corrupt in that sort of fun heavily armed liberal democracy sort of way. "What can you tell me about the Protectorate?" "The atrocities commited by the filthy militaristic Underrail Protectorate are simply too numerous, but I believe the most effective example would be the one that shaped Underrail the most... The demise of Biocorp. Some fifteen years ago the supercorporation had already been weakened from the inside and was no match for the growing power of the Protectorate. Biocorp ceased to exist, being swallowed by the Protectorate, leaving no one to compete for power over North Underrail. General Melek, the founder of Protectorate, disbanded the Great Council, and when I say disbanded I mean bribed, threatened and assassinated its members. A small group of remaining Biocorp loyalists attempted a coup but were quickly apprehended and executed together with another bunch of influential people who could have been potentially dangerous. No one dared stand in Melek's way after that, but to further brainwash the citizens and hide the apparent autocracy, he formed the United Stations, led by the council of five. Melek is in charge, of course, but this way it gives off a democratic feel, which is all bogus, naturally. Of course, not everyone is dumb to the core, so the Free Drones materialized into existence soon after that. Still, our fight is far from over, for the fabrications perpetuated by the Cans have great influence to this day. Flashy lies attract human herds the most." "What can you tell me about Bate?"Bate is the other guy standing in the room with Trenton. "Alvin is a good leader, and while we run the cell together, at the moment, I believe that even if something was to happen to me, he'd be able to command the base on his own without problems. He's one intelligent and capable man. At the same time, while he has a strong sense of humor and knows how to approach and socialize with people, he can forget himself at times. It's just... he 'overdoes' it from time to time, for the lack of a better term."At this point we try to end the coversation and Trenton immediately starts trying to talk to us again, this time with his introductory dialogue. So apologies for the dialogue being a little out of order. You see two men standing next to a table full of differently colored maps, some printed, some drawn by hand. A true strategic collage. One of the two men notices you enter and addresses you. "Hello, Henrietta and welcome to the base. My name is Corben Trenton and the gentleman next to me is Alvin Bate. We are currently in charge of the South Underrail Free Drones cell. We don't have much to offer in terms of comfort, as you can see for yourself; but don't worry, once we win this bloody war, we will not be hiding in under-passages anymore." "It's a pleasure to meet you two. "Likewise" "Always nice to see young blood here, kiddo. We need all the help we can get." "Before I forget, you should see Becket, our supplier, and tell him I sent you. All newcomers get to choose their gear when they first arrive. You'll do that on your way out, because we've got a little errand for you. Alvin, you or me?" "Hmmm... I'll do it. Alight, kiddo, it's story time. A long time ago, in Junkyard..." "Alvin, please..." "Okay, okay..." He clears throat. "Ever since Protectorate came to Junkyard and established the United Stations embassy, we had to form a small group of capable agents who will: a. Keep an eye out on whatever the Cans are doing. b. Try to counter the Protectorate brainwashing as much as possible, and various other tasks. They, the agents, are dug in a small hideout in the poor... poorer section of Junkyard and have operated without a hitch for quite some time. Your mission is simple, go to Junkyard, find the hideout - I'll explain how to get there in a moment and then talk to Sarah. You've met her before, she is the woman who sent you here and is in charge of the whole Junkyard operation. She'll give you some surveillance equipment they 'recovered' which needs to be brought here. Simple package retrieval mission, simple enough. "Hutch is already on his way there, you might need a helping hand with carrying all that stuff. You'll draw less attention if you go one by one." "What sort of equipment are we talking about?" "Unstable explosives... Just joking, kiddo! It's some high tech communications equipment that will come in handy to us. Protectorate approved." He laughs. "Who's Hutch?" "The man you passed when you entered the base. Don't you remember?"The one with the laser dogs, betrothed to Sarah? Geeze wake up Henrietta! "Come on Corben, she just got here. Too many names and faces to remember. By the way, Hutch volunteered to go to Junkyard. He wants to see Sarah." Laughs. "Bless 'em." "I'm ready to go, just tell me how to get there." "You've already met with Sarah in Junkyard, so you know how to reach it. Once you're in Junkyard, find Kareem's Bar. There's a small alley just north of it, and once there, take the first door on the left. Knock four times, slowly, and they'll let you in." "I'm on my way." "Good. Take the equipment to Becket once you are back." "It might seem like a dull thing to do, haul equipment that is, but someone's gotta do it. Usually this is done by Maura, but she can't show her face in Junkyard anymore unless she wants to end up behind bars again... you understand. Take care and stay free. Trenton nods.There's a third prominent member of the free drones we haven't met yet. But these two will explain whats up with that a little later. "So long and stay free." For now, let's get that stuff we were promised, the other stuff we were promised, and the extra goodies we were supposed to get before we head out on this mission from Becket.  Thank you, but it wasn't exactly like that. "Don't be so humble, you silly bastard. Brag! Brag until everyone gives you the look! I've an energy shield just for you! Hey, good deeds shouldn't go unrewarded, so I hope you like it!" He gives you an energy shield emitter.Not good advice Becket. But advice we will be taking. "Trenton told me to see you about some gear." "Yup, I've been told you'd come. At the moment, I can offer you some armor, some weapons or if you're a psi-gal, I've some of that stuff too."So Becket basically gives you a choice of weapons armor and psi gear. It's all pretty crap quality stuff for us at this point. But junk always has its uses in this game. "I'll take the suit of leather armor" "Here you go." He gives you a suit of leather armor. "Maura told me to see you." "Right! She arranged for you to get some extra gear. But shush - not a word to anyone about this!" He laughs. "Um... thanks for saving her. She's a, um, a dear friend of mine and... it was difficult without her. I'm just glad she's with us again. Khm, anyway, at the moment I can offer you some armor, some weapons or if you're a psi-gal, I've some of that stuff too." "I'll take a combat glove." "Here you go." He gives you a combat glove. "Goodbye Beckett."Lets see what we won...  Some metal combat gloves, ugh. Metal combat gloves cost far too much AP to ever be worth using for our build, which relies on us maximizing cumulative effects from repeated hits in a single round. Trash.  And this leather armor was also pretty unimpressive too.  And this shield isn't really worth having either. We'll drop them all in a nearby barrel and promptly forget about them. Equipment rewards are never really impressive unless it's something unique in this game outside of maybe the early game. We're also probably overlevelled for these missions at this point anyway.  Anyway, it's off to Junk Yard to pick up some surveillance gear I guess.  We're still buzzing from the juice we drank earlier so we'll just rift walk our way back to Junk Yard.  Which takes us just outside the location we needed to find too, handy.  Hmm the secret terrorist organization hideout has its front door wide open...  Guess it's down the hatch.  Down below, the hideout is eerily quiet.  All the doors appear to be barricaded too...  And I'm sure that red stain at the foot of that door is nothing important either...  The place seems abandoned so we dutifully abscond the contents of the fridge, whilst searching about the place.  Nothing here so far, but we do spy a vent. Might be a safer way of scoping out the place.    And aha, slinking out behind one of the barricaded doors reveals that the protectorate have set up an ambush for us. Well then.  Not that an ambush would have worked on us anyway, but we'll give them our own ambush instead.  Time Magic!  We try out a nail bomb on these two. Annoying didn't do any bleed damage to one of them, which is really what we want these grenade for.  But once we chain up a few bleeds, the blood just keeps on flowing!  Also we switch to our shock gloves because the extra electricity does good for us against the heavily armored dudes. We probably still need to find some gloves that work well against heavy armor. We're probably okay for the most part though.  Still it took us a whole round to take out one of them. So we get an assault rifle burst to the chest as a reward.  Which drat near kills us.  We remember that entangling these guys with a net does wonders for making them much more vulnerable before we mulch him into chum. Chum him into mulch?  The previous soldiers body has the final Protectorate Solider Dog Tags on their person.  We also find the blueprints to turn .44 caliber rounds in explosive rounds. Pistol weapons are truly the most varied in terms of damage variety, short of thought control damage, there's a pistol out there for any other sort of damage type you might want to deliver.  Back into the vents.  I think it's possible to squeeze past the rubble up there, but I didn't consider that at the time of playing.  So we just decide to waltz into the main ambush by the front door.  Unfortunately Hutch and Sarah were executed. Laser is now an orphan.  On Hutch, we find our one and only Anarchist Symbol oddity.  And our very last Protectorate Can oddity in a nearby locker. It seems the surveillance equipment was a bit of red herring too, since we find nothing of the sort in here. Just death..  and those about to meet death.  We already pacified half of the ambush, so now its just the lightly armored goof balls to gently caress up. One of them is a sniper though, so we best be crafty. Good thing we always are.  We nail them to the ground.  And slow mo our way up to the shock trooper and pummel him real good.  Then we land a lucky net throw on the sniper.  Take a hit of adrenaline and run just out of her line of sight. Giving us enough breathing room to recover whilst she can't do anything.  Then next turn we're already still maxed out on speed buffs.  So we just walk up and punchy punch punch. Probably should have switched back to The Claw weapon in this section for the extra infection and bleed chances, since these guys weren't exactly heavily armored. But oh well.  We even get our adrenaline back after the fight, so we only lost a few batteries and a minuscule amount of psi power.  Unfortunately, the hideout was very compromised and the protectorate massacred everyone in here.  Not much to do but to report the failure to the higher ups.   Poor Laser.   "The Protectorate found out about the hideout. They ambushed me there, but I made it out alive." "What? What happened to Hutch, Sarah and the rest?" "They are gone. I'm sorry." Trenton bites his lip, and his stare shifts toward the ceiling. As he lowers his head back, he speaks. "How did those pigs find out?" "There's nothing we could've done. We're blind and deaf in Junkyard now." "Oh, we are, but the Cans are not. They knew Henrietta was coming and ambushed her. That's what you just said, right?" "Well, 'ambushed', nobody can really ambush me, but they tried." "The whole hideout has been wiped and you're bragging?"Becket told me to do it! "Give kiddo a break, she barely made it out alive." "Then this is the final proof: There is a spy in our ranks. This is not the first time this happened, Henrietta. We've already had several suspicious Protectorate-somehow-knew-we-were-there situations." He sighs. "You're right, I'm afraid... We have a serious problem." "If the Cans really have a spy here, then they know about the whole plan. We have to move fast, Alvin. Or else, we risk everything we've worked so hard for." "What is this 'plan' you had mentioned?" "Exactly six months ago, the three of us, Alvin, Marcella and I have devised a plan which would completely paralyze the Protectorate machinery in South Underrail. Since you came here, we've lost a critical hideout in Junkyard; we've lost many good men and women, and foremost - friends; we are also absolutely positive that there is a traitor within our ranks. Ever since you came here... But don't worry, I have full faith in your loyalty. You couldn't have possibly known about all these things, about our plans, and after all, we've had our own doubts for some time before your arrival. Because of all this, the less people know about what we're about to do - the better. First, allow me to explain the situation... As you know, South Underrail is divided into Lower Underrail, where we are now, and Upper Underrail, which is above us, naturally. The Protectorate's largest base in the region, Fort Apogee, is located in Upper Underrail, and it is virtually untouchable. It is their main base in South Underrail, and as such is heavily defended and out of our reach at the moment. Meanwhile, in Lower Underrail, South Railroad Outpost and the Junkyard embassy below it are not, and that makes them much more viable targets. Now, you might ask, can't the Protectorate send troops to reinforce these locations? Well, yes and no. If we exclude small transition points, Lower and Upper Underrail are connected only by Core City, and due to the political situation there, as well as the logistical problems of transporting personnel and equipment through such an inconvenient location makes it very difficult to reinforce something as remote as SRO effectively. Because of this, the Cans are trying to establish a large troop elevator that is to connect Upper and Lower Underrail. With it, they'll be capable of reinforcing SRO with relative ease and further ease their expansion into the South. This cannot be allowed to happen. Fortunately, the elevator is not fully operational yet, but we expect its completion fairly soon. Based on all this, the plan is as follows... Our main target is South Railroad Outpost. Cut off, the Junkyard embassy will be easy pickings, and the Protectorate influence in Junkyard will be gone. But in order to do that, it is necessary to sabotage the elevator first. With it taken care of, the only way to get down here is through Core City, and, as I've said before, that will take too much time. Sure, they might be able to pull some troops to defend SRO, but nothing really significant, we hope. After the elevator is sabotaged, we take out SRO and, with the exclusion of small garrisons, we basically control Lower Underrail. That's it. It seems simple, but it will be difficult to pull off, especially due to the fact that our hideout in Junkyard is gone and that we have a traitor within our ranks. That's why we must move quickly, we weren't planning on executing the operation yet, but now we're under serious pressure. I want you to take out this elevator as soon as possible. Once you are ready, come and see me."So this will be our next mission which we'll get to shortly. But, we haven't met anyone here named Marcella and she isn't anywhere to be found in this place. "You mentioned Marcella. Who is she?" "Marcella Green was one of this cell's leaders, alongside Alvin and myself. I must admit that she was the... the charismatic one. She knew how to motivate people, how to make them believe they can overcome anything Protectorate throws at them and end up victorious. It's something I really admired, and truthfully... I envied her for it. It's something I'll never be able to do. She disappeared without a trace about two months ago. She left the base for an unspecified reason and never returned. We searched for her, but as you can see, we haven't found her." "Maybe she ran away?" "She is not a coward, that I can be certain of. Either something happened to her, or she's not on our side anymore. Yes, perhaps she is the spy. It would be logical. On the other hand, we've had incidents where Protectorate expected us happen even after she disappeared. We searched for bugs and other hidden equipment, but found nothing. I hope she hasn't betrayed us. Traitors are punished by death, and if we ever find her, we're going to have a long talk..."Tracking Marcella down is something of an optional side quest. It's not really obvious how to do this exactly, as like many of the quests in this game you kind of have to stumble into the solution for it. Doing this is the only way to find out who the mole in the free drones truly is. Incidentally Oculus has this information to say on the three cell leaders: 1. Alvin Bate Full name: Alvin Bate Position: Free Drones South Underrail cell leader Place of birth: North Underrail, location unknown Age: Between 30 and 40 Current residence: Free Drones under-passage base - Alvin Bate is one of the leaders of the Free Drones primary cell in South Underrail, alongside Corben Trenton and (formerly) Marcella Green - Little information on his life before joining the Free Drones exists. He is presumed to have arrived to South Underrail with the first Free Drones, and that he is one of the original founders of this region's primary cell. His only known family member is his alleged daughter Milla Bate, currently located in Dis, North Underrail. 1. Corben Trenton Full name: Corben Trenton Position: Free Drones South Underrail cell leader Place of birth: North Underrail, location unknown Age: Between 35 and 40 Current residence: Free Drones under-passage base - Corben Trenton is one of the leaders of the Free Drones primary cell in South Underrail, alongside Alvin Bate and (formerly) Marcella Green - Little information on his life before joining the Free Drones exists. He is presumed to have arrived to South Underrail with the first Free Drones, and that he is one of the original founders of this region's primary cell. 1. Marcella Green Full name: Marcella Green Position: Free Drones South Underrail cell leader (until disappearance) Place of birth: South Underrail, location unknown Age: Between 25 and 35 Current residence: Unknown Last known residence: Free Drones under-passage base - Marcella Green was one of the three leaders of the Free Drones primary cell in South Underrail, alongside Corben Trenton and Alvin Bate, until her sudden disappearance. - Little information on her life before joining the Free Drones exists. She has no known family members in or outside of the movement, and neither her place of birth nor previous residences are known. - She went missing approximately two months ago, and her current whereabouts are unknown. While there is no intel confirming or denying any assassination or apprehension attempts were made by Underrail Protectorate or otherwise, or that she has abandoned the movement for any reason, the first is the most likely of the scenarios considering the current political climate. However, no bodies matching her description have been recovered as yet. - As of recently, a strange woman has been noticed visiting the Hanging Rat. Her visits are frequent, yet she never orders anything, and neither does she ever cormmunicate with anyone. All she does is sit at a table and observe. This paragraph exists in this file only due to a single account mentioning her holding a "circle-A pendant" in her hand. Well that last paragraph on Marcella might give us a clue on where she might have gotten to... "I'm ready to take out the Protectorate elevator." "Alvin, I'll brief Henrietta, if you don't mind." "Not at all. Let the briefing begin." "Good. Henrietta, I must remind you again that this mission and everything after it is really important for the future of South Underrail. You will go on this mission completely alone, it is important to keep everything low profile until we finally strike." How do I reach the elevator, exactly? "The elevator lies within Epione Lab, a facility located in Upper Underrail, between Core City's top level, and Protectorate main base - Fort Apogee. The easiest way to find it is to follow the blue metro line. You'll know it when you see it. It is safe to assume that the facility is well defended, so you must find a clever way to get in. Based on some old plans we managed to obtain, the facility has a weak spot - its load-bearing pillars. If you can destroy these pillars, the whole construction will collapse, we hope." "'We hope'?" "Things can go awry, nothing is one hundred percent certain. However, I believe that the mission will be a complete success." "I guess I should see Becket about the explosives?" "That is correct. He will give you five C4 charges and a detonator. Once you have placed all the explosives, get to a safe distance and detonate. Protectorate will be in chaos after this, leaving us with enough room to assault South Railroad Outpost. I wish you all the best, Henrietta. Don't forget to talk to Becket. Take care, kiddo. Make them pay for all the lives they took."Incidentally if we joined the Protectorate, one of the missions would involve thwarting this exact bombing from happening in the first place. "Thank you, I will go to him now."But first we'll have a little chat with Bate, since he and Marcella were close once. "Hey, kiddo" "what can you tell me about the Free Drones?" "That's us!" He laughs. "I think I'll start from the beginning. After Biocorp was taken over by Protectorate, there was no one to compete with them over North Underrail. Over the course of several years, the s solidified their rule and demonstrated how brutal they can be. For instance, the great riot against an invasive privacy law led to five hundred and forty six civilian casualties. Come on, kiddo, those people didn't kill themselves - the Cans did! But even despite that, many are still supporting the Protectorate! Fools... Anyway, some eleven-twelve years ago, a young anarchist named Wallace Steel founded a movement that will fight the tyrants. Thus, the Free Drones were born. A small group of rebels at first, they spread the truth about Protectorate. Wallace was soon imprisoned and executed, but the movement grew. Now, we are powerful in the North, not so much in the South. Here, the Protectorate hasn't had the time to reveal its true face, and because of the constant problems with raiders and the like, many fall for the story of protection and unification. I could go on and on, but this should be enough for now, kiddo. "what can you tell me about Marcella?" His stare turns sorrowful. "Please kiddo, I'd rather not talk about it. Marcella and I... we, we had something special. Look, I just can't talk about it right now. She disappeared two months ago and... and it would be too painful for me if we found out she's been dealing with the Protectorate. Bloody Cans."I guess we're gonna have to track her down the old fashioned way. "Bye" We'll quickly grab the explosives off of Becket first.  "I'm here to pick up the explosives." "Going out to cause some trouble?" He laughs. "Here you go, you bastard. Make the Cans pay for everything they did! So... that's five charges and a detonator, if I'm not mistaken. Lemme see... one... two... three, four... where did I put you... ah, there it is - five! Detonator - check! That's it. I've everything you need." He gives you the explosives and the detonator. "Oh, I will make them pay, Becket. I'm on fire!" "Good luck, you brave bastard. Stay free!" "What can you tell me about Marcella?" "Um, I don't know how much I can tell you about that, Henrietta. She disappeared about two months ago, and everyone is clueless about what exactly happened. Some say she was a Protectorate spy, some say she died fighting the Cans, bravely. I don't really know what to think. But I know that, if she ever shows up again... It's won't be pretty. I'm sure of it."Everyone in the base will have something to say about Marcella. "Goodbye, Becket." But the person we really want to ask her about it Darling.  "What can you tell me about Marcella?" "Marcella... She was one of our leaders. Bate, Trenton and her were quite a trio." She smiles. "Bate and her were also quite a duo, if you catch my drift, sister. What was that he called her... hmmm... Muffin, right! I miss her too, just like many others. Heck, no one still knows whatever happened to her. But, let's move on to brighter subjects."Her nickname was Muffin. That's important information actually, it'll save us from needing to pass a persuasion check later on. "Bye Darling" "Bye, sis. Stay free." At thing point I was ready to track down Marcella. I'd forgotten exactly where she was.(I hadn't looked at the Oculus files on her in quite a while either)  I do however know that there is a Marcella in Core /city.  Here are the C4 explosives by the way. Can't be used as anything but for their intended use.  She's upstairs in the electronics merchant building.  I believe that she's just the merchants wife, and her name is just a coincidence. Unless she plays some role in one of the JKK or Praetorian Security oligarch missions, I'm not sure she serves any plot related purpose.  Ah well, we'll track the real Marcella down some other time.  For now we head back to Upper Underail.  Next time, we blow up Epione Labs.
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Dec 28, 2023 08:35
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Chapter 56 - Epiblown Labs We've arrived at the entrance to Epione Labs and we're ready and committed to blowing it up.  This is a pretty tough mission to pull off, especially if you intend to go in guns blazing.  There's three guards at the entrance. A heavy gunner right in front of us, a sniper above, and there's an energy weapons shock trooper guy wandering about too. The entrance layout is just twisted enough that it makes a melee confrontation a little bit tricky.  Time to put on the ol' Henrietta charm. "I um... was sent here from the high command to inspect this... facility... thing..." The guard points his weapon at you, looking you straight in the eyes. "How would you like to inspect this?" "Got the message. I'm off."Okay, well that didn't work. Time to use a more subtle method of persuasion.  Even with all our tools and what have you. Heavily armored guys are still kind of a pain to deal with. Fighting them is often too much of a gamble to reliably deal with them quickly. It's normally not too big of a deal when there on their own. But when there's multiple guys about, this starts to become problematic.  That opening round wasn't great. Let's try this again.  This time we'll make sure our equipment is nice and charged up.  This job would go a lot smoother if we had the agility to hop this fence.  But at least our opening moves hit a lot harder this time.  Naturally, like always, I've forgotten I have an energy shield and have failed to deploy it. We stun the gunner with our trusty tazer at least.  The sniper tries for an aimed shot. With no shield up, this will no doubt kill us if it lands.  Thankfully, the sniper misses.  The shock trooper in back on the other hand is quite a marksman with his laser pistol.  Next round starts and the Heavy Gunner succumbs to his bleeding/infected wounds.  We waste most of our next turn trying to path our way up to the sniper. Snipers are pretty useless at close range. Sniper rifles take a huge accuracy penalty up close.  We get a lucky hit in and kill them in one punch! If only all of the Protectorate were as lightly armored as this guy.  The shock trooper flanks us from behind.  Our armor proved 0 protection against energy weapons so this will hurt.  The shock trooper is also surprisingly rapid firing. That confirms my suspicions he's using a laser instead of plasma pistol. They're not nearly as damaging but are much more rapid fire. At any rate, he kill us. Feck.  Okay, attempt three. Shields up this time.  This time the sniper lands their aimed shot. Even with our shield up, it drat near kills us.  Heavy gun guy down.  And the shock trooper EMP grenades our shield away!    And the shock trooper gets us again. Feck.  Okay, the positioning of the two in the back is much too precarious to just hit the heavy gunner and hope to survive any further assault. So we make use of our considerable stealth skill, and just barely manage to slink by the heavy gunner without being spotted.  Now we can pick off the sniper without his friends noticing.  Well alright, they did notice but not before we were able to hide again.  The investigating shock trooper dies next.  And then its just the heavy guy.    Phew, front entrance secured at last!  The sniper has a key card to that cargo door in the back there.  This would likely just provide us with an alternative means of sneaking past the entrance guards.  Inside we find a desk with our last "ArenaNow" Broadcasting Schedule oddity.  Deeper inside, we spy the last guard in this section, he's got a shield. But he shouldn't be a problem for us. Buut at this point I'm thinking, our shock gloves aren't really cutting the mustard anymore.  So we make a short retreat to see if we can't make something more impactful.   We Juice our way to Camp Hathor in search of decent quality animal leathers.  We didn't really find anything too impressive. We also grab one of our serrated TiChrome Blades, honestly this might be a bit of a waste, we should probably have saved these for something more powerful, but oh well.  The rathound leather we grabbed at Camp Hathor wasn't really that good of a quality. The idea being we'll make some pneumatic gloves, they only door major damage every couple of hits, but it's generally more reliable at penetrating heavy armor in my opinion.  Looking our for better leathers we swing by Booth in the Core City Sewers. He had some siphoner leather that wasn't half-bad.  We end up making a pneumatic glove set that is weaker by 1 point of max damage compared to our shock gloves, but also has a far better power core, so it'll hit more often before needing to be recharged. Not a bad trade off.  Okay let's give em a test spin.  I mean this guy isn't the most heavily armored foe, but he'll do.  Yeah, that'll do nicely.  In the back is the stairs down the lab proper.  We find some pretty high quality insulating and galvanic foam padding. Might be handy if we need cold or electrical resistance later.  We trip a camera as we sneak around a corner and bump head first into a more guards.  Reloading, we try fighting said guards more on our terms.  It goes decently well.      But then a guy further into the facility trips the alarm. This will likely make this much more difficult.  We kill the approaching sniper and then retreat upstairs to recharge and recover.  Unfortunately, tripping the alarm downstairs called in the chemical troopers. I don't think these guys are quite on par with the protectorates chemical assault unit.    But uh, they're doing just fine on their own.  They're got the trait that makes us more vulnerable to chemical weapons damage too.  They overwhelm us with their war crimes.  Okay, let's try this again with a bit more tact. We'll disable the cameras with percussive maintenance first.  The guards come to investigate but don't see us this time.  We decided to pull out some of our barbed nets for a change. These are rare and non-craftable, but this is as good a place as any to use them.   Assuming I even remember to use them at all.  There are five of these load bearing columns down here we'll need to plant our C4 on.  We've yet to be able to obtain pokes grand enough to do this otherwise.     Another patrolling guard is down.  We slink past this small office with two more guards in it.  and disable another camera.   All hacking is childs play for us at this point.   We find the last Tourist Guide oddity we'll ever need inside.  And some nice tungsten steel blades for potential a future craft.  We start planting our bombs.   Three down. Two to go.  We keep poking about for more goodies.  We find a small armory in the back.  Along with another shock trooper in a security room.   We swipe his key card to some storage room inside here.  And the last Bubblegum oddity too. Which gives us our next level up.  At this point, we're carrying way too much junk. So we ditch a whole lot of crap, mostly ammo. Ammunition is good trade fodder, but we're not super strapped for cash at the moment. Ideally we would have stashed it somewhere off this map so we could retrieve it later if need be, since we're gonna blow this map to smithereens.  Anyway, level up time! Even level 22 means a new Feat to pick.  Now, based on the build I'm following, we should grab Premeditation next. Most of the remaining feats we're supposed to take are there to boost our Temporal Manipulation skills. It's an ability that lets you fire off a cheaper costing psi ability instantly at a greater range. That's not bad but there's a feat we can grab right now that'd be much more beneficial to our current heavy armor predicament. We can always get this feat at a later date.  Instead, we'll take Expose Weakness. This is very useful for us. If you successfully land this hit it halves mechanical resistance for two whole turns! That's gonna come in handy when fighting the rest of these cans. It also works on robots too! It's main drawback is a fairly long cool down. But hey that's what Temporal Manipulation is for.  We sink another point of specialization into our combo:stun chance.  And largely just boost our mechanical, electronics and tailoring, so we can make nicer stuff. And also so we can guarantee to hit some high skill checks in the late game.   We effortlessly hack into the security terminal nearby.  And disable all remaining cameras and security doors.  And we can now confidently bash up these last few guards.    Let's see how he fares now that his armor rating is halved.    Not bad at all.  Incidentally the shock trooper had a pair of tabi boots that rivaled our own in quality, so we swap those out.  Okay, one last real challenge to this place and we'll be good to finish it all off.  and it lies in this room.  There's a Protectorate Dreadnought in here!   Even with expose weakness, this things are very heavily armored. They're probably one of the toughest enemies in the entire game. The base game almost certainly. There's a whole squad of these things at Fort Apogee, the Protectorates main base in South Underrail that you can fight along side the rest of the troops they have their. Easily one of the hardest fights in the whole game. It's fun watching the best builds people make effortlessly crush it.  Anyway, to pull this off, we'll likely need a combination of a lot of lucky crits and keeping it disabled with EMP grenades.  Since these things have a machine gun arm a drill arm and more than ready to use either.    After three free rounds trying to disable the bastard, it gets to fight back.  It gets numerous burst fires in a single round a kills us no contest.  Fun fact, if we had joined the Protectorate, there would be a mission where you have to rescue a missing squad of troops who were investigating an old facility in the upper caves. The troops got trapped by some burrowers after a cave in. You get to rescue them but piloting one of these dreadnoughts through that facility. It is every bit as deadly. Burrowers cannot harm it in the slightest and you just mow them all down with the minigun. It's great fun, a shame you can take it with you once you leave the facility. Oh well.  We get much luckier this time round.  And kaboom, its dead.  It has the unique Dreadnought Controller oddity about its person.  And now we're more or less free to finish off blowing up this place.    Well alright there was one more guard to deal with.    He was no trouble at this point.   Nothing terribly exciting left to loot in this place.  And the last column is inside this very cold room.   With the last bomb in place we flee before we freeze to death.  We freeze solid just as we get out of the room.  And we're done, the hypothermia will last for an annoyingly long time, but that's alright.  I recommend standing clear of the lab itself as you can kill yourself in the resulting explosion.  There's a loud screen shaking rumble, and Epione Labs and it's backup elevator is now toast.  Off we go back to the Free Drones with the good news. Zeniel fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 06:21
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You seem pretty unstoppable against single opponents at this point! What else in the base game is even a threat if it doesn't get the drop on you?
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Dec 30, 2023 19:36
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Chronische posted:You seem pretty unstoppable against single opponents at this point! What else in the base game is even a threat if it doesn't get the drop on you? In the base game? Next to nothing really. If we move first and its a one-on-one fight, the only enemy I can think of that might stand a chance is an Industrial Robot. Since they have an enormous 80%/40 mechanical resistance. They are pretty rare fights though and are also typically on your side when you do fight them. Beside that, there might be one other enemy that might give us some grief in a straight up fight. I don't know for certain as you only find them in one particular location in the very late game, so I've not had a chance to see how we fair against them, but it is a small worry in the back of my mind. But I guess we'll find out when we bump into them. Outside of that, greater coil spiders might still pose a bit of challenge. I can likely kill them in one move, but if I don't they usually win since I tend not to have much in the way of electrical resistance. They're also always come in large packs and live in trapped lairs that stun you and are hard to avoid. Crawlers despite becoming pretty squishy for us at this point always remain somewhat of a challenge due to their extreme stealthiness and ambush nature. But yeah, apart from places like Fort Apogee, most base game fights are no significant challenge for us anymore. I was thinking maybe MacLander back in Chapter 26, who mopped the floor with us even when we had the upper hand. But he is technically an Expedition addition, and I did rechallenge him after reading your post just to see how we go now, and yeah he's no trouble even with backup now. The rest of main challenges combat wise will likely come when we hit the Expedition DLC properly. There is one enemy in particular that's always filled my head with doubts about Henrietta's chances. There's a couple of late patched areas we haven't seen too that bring a bit of challenging flavor in upper underrail too as well as everything that is that late game. Plus there's anything to do with Heavy Duty. I haven't a clue how challenging any of that will be, but it sure is advertised as such at least. One thing I forgot to mention about Heavy Duty is that it adds in a companion NPC too by the looks of it, so that'll be its own special brand of challenge also.
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Dec 31, 2023 05:47
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Happy to see this back! Truly a Christmas miracle. 
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Dec 31, 2023 14:42
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Chapter 57 - Jazzed up, Shredded, Rockin', and er... Kokoschkaing? Last time we were on our way back to the Free Drones with the news of our successful sabotage.  But first we'll replenish our supplies of various good and sell off the extra weight.   We can craft ourselves some nice Mk III EMPs, their 3 turn disable will stay good and useful for the rest of the game.  More Mk IV frags. We will likely never get the chemistry needed to make Mk V's but that's okay, their isn't much significance from IV to V isn't significant enough to really bother.  I've concluded that the Laser Cat is probably not the most practical weapon and we could really use that extra 4.00 carrying capacity.  And with that done we'll take the access tunnels back to the base rather than wasting more Juice.    Huh, one of the muggers respawned? hmm. Maybe leveling up enough brings in more muggers. This game does has some fairly long hidden timers going on at times so it might just be that.  He was definitely tougher than expected, although not by much.    Whilst walking round the corner leaving Core City, we bump into a pretty nasty random encounter. Some rogue plasma sentries.  Of course we're pretty good now against three plasma sentries at once. This gives me a lot of confidence for the late game in many respects.    Childs play.    We make it back to the base without any further issues.  "The elevator has been taken out." "Excellent. Just excellent. While the Cans are in chaos, we can safely commence the attack on South Railroad Outpost. I've assembled a fireteam of selected fighters will be under your command during the attack."Okay now for the final drones mission, and it can be a toughy. "Who are they?" "Jazz, Shred, Rocksteady and Kokoschka. They will be leaving the base immediately and will meet you in the area just south of GMS. You will then storm the base: Your mission is to eliminate all opposition and secure the elevator leading down to the embassy, which will effectively cut off all Protectorate troops stationed in Junkyard from Lower Underrail. We have to make the operation as quick as possible in order to minimize the risk of Protectorate reinforcements. Don't worry, I will have our fighters cover all potential reinforcement routes so that you don't get flanked or attacked from behind, but there is only so much pressure a group of armed men and women can do to hold off a prolonged assault from a much better equipped force; act as fast as you can, but also act smart. That's it, Henrietta. Good luck, and death to Protectorate!"So yes we will be attacking the station in lower underrail just above the Protectorate embassy in Junk Yard. It's heavily defended and fortified. But at least we'll have back up, we're gonna need it. Although that also means we have to try and keep a group of independently acting NPCs from doing stupid things, getting themselves killed, and bottle necking narrow passages. "I'm ready to go." "Make us proud, Henrietta." "This is going to be a difficult task. But we have faith in you, kiddo. Death to Protectorate. Down with the United Stations!" "So long and stay free." We'll navigate our way to the assault team via the tunnels.    We got a little bit lost trying to find the most direct way there by walking, but we're on track.  Ah here they are!   "Yeah! We're gonna dominate the bastards! Hardcore destruction - Free Drones style!" He laughs. "I haven't split any 'Tectorate noggings in a while. This is gonna feel mighty good." "This my first fight with you! I can't wait to, how Rocksteady say... errr, hardboil domesticate the most greatest evil Cans in Underrail! Borzbosledachki Pokzlich!" Facepalms Facepalms even harder. Facepalms the hardest. "Why you, how you say... face-smack!? What I say wrong? It my battle cry... Borzbosledachki Pokzlich!" "Yes... All in all, we're ready to move, sister. Just say the word."Despite the goofery each of these guys is formidable against Proctorate cans on their own, so we're in good company. "Commence the attack." "All right boys, you heard Henrietta. Death to Protectorate!"We get our own choice of battle cry and this point, we'll go with the most appropriate. "Invictus!" "Borzbosledachki Pokzlich! Ih bre, che gi razpalim ki dundechake prkonoschne!" And we're off!  The Protectorate managed to fortify the screen just before their main base.  We don't get much of an opening move ourselves.  But that's okay we're in good company. Shred is a killer crossbow marksman.  And I think Rocksteady threw a grenade at them.   Their shock trooper shuts down all our shields. Blah.  Jazz is pretty effective thermokineticist so he keeps them locked down with cold damage.  Our turn again.    We rush up to the front lines, and spot a sniper. We disable him with a slow spell. Sniper rifles need a lot of AP to fire, so I think that kept him from acting.   Jazz finishes off the heavy gunner.  And the sniper halves our health. Welp, hopefully the slow kept him from firing twice.  The shock trooper decides we aren't worth the hassle and focuses on fighting the rest of the drones.  Jazz let's him have it.  And freezes him solid.  We punch the frozen guy and he literally shatters into icy pieces. Good synergy.  We heal up and take cover behind the pillar to prevent the sniper picking us off.  Shred disables the sniper with a stunning bolt shot.  And then crits him with an aimed shot, killing him dead.  And that's the first wave of guys down. It's possible that Kokoschka contributed to this fight in some way but I dunno, he'll help out later.  Aaand Rocksteady drops dead.... Huh. He must've taken some morphine and then had less than 1/3 of his health and ODed.. That's the only thing I can think that happened. That's annoying.  "Continue with the attack!" "Right behind you! Death to the Cans!"Time for the main assault now.  This is gonna be a lot more annoying.  We've got gun turrets and bottle necks and basically no cover to contend with.  Since we've been inside this place before we've got a little bit of knowledge about what to expect. This power box could help shut down the turrets. Although there would be no way to creep up to them without getting caught that I can think of off the top of my head. Especially given that you can't sneak past gun turrets.  Kokoschka takes the lead letting loose with his AK. He's actually pretty fierce with it.  He nearly one shots one of the turrets all by himself.  The fight is made especially annoying by the turrets being spaced wide enough that you can't disable both of them simultaneously. Also the shielded heavy gunner in the front is also positioned such that he can't be hit at the same time either. Prick.    The heavy gunners start swarming. We bottle neck the entrance to keep the rest of the drones charging to their deaths.  Shred takes out the right turret.  Kokoschka takes out the left.  And then drains the shield on the front guard.  The we move in to crush.  And crush we do.  More soldiers keep running up from behind us.  We shoot up a psi booster to replenish our active psi pool.  And we get flashbanged. But Jazz resists at least.     Jazz has done something a bit annoying here, he's blocking anyone else from advancing forward. That's going hurt us a bit later.  For now we're doing alright.  We shoot up a focus boost to do more crits.       Uh oh, we're out of shield and Major Clifton has joined in and is a decent shot and keeps on shooting.  Shred drops another one.     Hmm that wasn't the best choice of ours, we're getting gassed out and we didn't heal.   And it cost us our life.  Right lets try that again!  Shred has really good line of sight and fires into the fog of war.  Kokoschka toughs some direct hits.   Aaand Jazz blocks the entrance before we can get past him. Well gently caress. So we're pretty helpless at the moment.   Well we can still nail bomb them for now.     Desperate to contribute we throw out some more offensive Temporal Manipulation spells.  Not that it had much chance to do anything.        Well the rest of the squad seems to be doing alright without much input from us. Fair enough.   Kokoschka get pretty shot up badly.  But he dishes it out much better than he takes.   Jazz Finishes off Major Clifton.  And then finally moves out of the way. At long last.       The squad disables the remaining stragglers and we just wander up and finish them off.   And that's that. Well not quite.  There's one last turret on the other side of the tracks that's too far away to participate in the main fight. In hindsight I should have just cut the power, but oh well.    Powers down!  As are we all Kokoschka.  The elevator down to the main embassy is shut down and the protectorate inside are now trapped. Well unless they leave via the Junk Yard harbor I guess.   And with that we can return to base and finish up our business with the Free Drones.
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Jan 1, 2024 05:19
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| # ? May 4, 2024 05:52 |
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Chapter 58 - We Get Lost.  Time to make our way back to the Free Drones with news of our victory.  We'll wander back via lower underrail, all the way round to the steps near Crossroads Station, I believe that's the closest way down to the base.   Whilst traveling back however, I noticed that there was a few places in lower underrail we hadn't actually explored completely. So it looks like we'll be taking a little bit of a detour first.  Opening up this store caused combat to initiate.  Dropping a flare down reveals a pair of lurkers waiting in ambush.   They've taunted their last Invictus.  Swing back south we end up in the rail tunnel that goes to Crossroads. The really dark one.   We spot an emergency phone that I didn't know you could fix.  Naturally we're skilled enough to fix it.    And we find a new door.  It's a bit dark in there so we put on our NVGs for a better viewing.  I reckon we've stumbled upon one of Phreak's old haunts.   Yep there's a wanted poster in here for him too. Beyond a few fluff pieces, there actually wasn't much of anything actually to take in there.      Moving in the direction of Rail Crossing, I just realized I've been calling it by the wrong name, it's not called Crossroads Station at all. You can tell I've not played this is a little while. Anyway, we spot another location we hadn't check out either.  This one just has a few dogs barking about the place.     Towards that back is some steps down to the service tunnels.  Which leads us to a part of the tunnels we also forgot to check out. I think that's the last location in the service tunnels at least.   Down the ways we find more dogs.   We're making too much noise so we've stirred up a whole mess of Lurkers now.   Piece of ca-  Oh great, we've been netted.  Not much we can do except whip throwing knives and hope for the best. We aren't even wearing our knife throwing gloves.   We drop an Entropic Recurrence too in the hopes of doing extra damage.  We also sensibly shield up, not that shields are all that effective against crossbows, but they'll do something.   And then more Lurkers join the party... Fortunately we're no longer entangled.  And then the Lurker that ambushes us from behind, nets us again. Urgh, reload.  Okay this time we'll be a little more stealthy.  Ooh almost wander into that bear tra-  Oh for fucks sake. Clumsy clicks cause corpses.  Fortunately none of the Lurkers saw fit the investigate their trap going off, which is often unusual, but we'll take it.  Now we can grenade the lot of them at once.     And a fifth bastard nets us again!  We give him a nice nail bomb to the face.  He heals a bit, despite all the bleed and infections and stuns us.  Then crits us.  Then we return the favor.  Now there is a ladder going into a deep dark hole here. We'll be checking that place out in a little bit. It's simply the worst in there.  We find some lockers with nothing worth mentioning inside and little else.  And that's all we'll look at down here for now, we'll keep poking about lower underrail for now.  We pass by that place where the black crawler was.  Because the next area north has a location we held off going into.  This place is a little bit of a nasty Lurker ambush.  There's a nice long corridor and bear trap on the floor.  Towards the back are a few Lurkers, we can see him yet, but one of them is a sniper. That sniper will pick you off before you even know what's happening if you come in here unprepared.   Ah that talking shield is probably them now. We're exposed but our shield is up at least.  We must have a lower frequency shield because it didn't exactly resist all that much.  Ah well, sniper rather get to fire more than once, so now it's his turn to bleed.  The last surprise down here is a unique Lurker, Flynn the Flayer. He's a spear wielder so he's an Expedition addition.  He's fairly robust, but as stunnable as any other Lurker.  Not an issue.  He's got a couple of interesting things on his person for us. Firstly, he has of course some barbed throwing nets that Lurkers love so much. Always a bonus to have some of those. Still a real shame these are not craftable.  He also has an overcoat that's made of Leper Serpent leather. We won't be seeing any of those critters till we get to the Black Sea. As far as their leather is concerned, they give a flat 30 decrease to persuasion irrespective of the leather quality with the benefit of having a pretty good mechanical resistance bonus. The trade off however, also includes a pretty significant armor penalty. Enough so that it would affect our feats and agility bonus, so we won't be considering serpent leather armor. If we infused it with some super steel it would also grant some good bio damage resistances too. Some super steel infused serpent leather tabi boots might an alright consideration, as they grant immunity to being sent off balance. Although when the time comes we will likely have to choose our super steel products very carefully.  Last he was carrying a unique spear, the Glaive. Comparing it to a regular spear weapons it looks like it has some reduced cooldowns for spear based combat feats and has a chance to inflict, carved up which is nasty debuff usually given to swords and possibly knives I think. Neat, but not for us.  The room south of the lurker ambush is a tiny crawler nest. Although there is at least one death stalker in the mix. Fun.    Having killed most of them but in pretty bad shape we decide to pop an antidote to the poison.  Which promptly kills us due to death stalker poison inflicting bio damage on you for any drug you attempt to consume for the duration the poison is in your system. We may well have survived if we hadn't have attempted to medicate.  Anyway, we try this once again.    Crawlers are definitely causing us a lot of trouble this time round.    Okay, I think that's all of them.  We switch off our NVG and suck our thumb in the dark.  We once again forget about the hyperallergenic effect, at least we saved this time.  So after a short bit of waiting around, the effect wears off and we can heal again. There's essentially nothing in that room worth taking so it was just painful waste of resources. Crawlers everyone!  At the far north of the ambush is a second entrance we can use to carry on out of here.     Okay, our last detour before we head back to the drones will be down this ladder from earlier.  It's dark and we've already pissed of something.  Why yes, this place is also packed with more bloody crawlers! Mostly the Death Stalker variety too!   What follows next is a relentless series of flare throwing and careful wandering, combined with a lot of reloads.  OW     There aren't too many down here, but more than enough to make this place a complete nuisance.        At this point I try and magnesium bomb to try and flush out some more and only succeed in setting myself on fire. Blah.         So many of them.    This time we just accidentally blow ourselves up.     Okay I think that's the last of them...   And what's our reward?  Two tiny rooms with very little in them.  Sigh, I guess this place might better off being explored if you had classic XP on instead, since you could at least got a lot of experience for killing all the crawlers.  Not sure it would be worth it even then. But oh well, it's done.   Next time, we'll actually bring the news to the Drones.
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Jan 3, 2024 09:58
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