Oh lord yes. That was one of the things that got me interested in this game. 'Oh my god clean sky yes thank you.' If you're a fan of mods and such, I can point you towards the weather mod I use that adds even more weather options and such.

> - The weapon mod system is stupidly complicated, yet I'm starting to
>like it, if only because its complicatedness comes in part from a wide
>range of customization options than the one in New Vegas, and
>FO3 didn't have one at all, so take the win, right?

I started getting the hang of it and came to realize that a lot of the upgrades are often simply improved versions of previous ones. Improved Crit Damage Mark 1, Mark 2, etc. A lot of my main guns are actually the versions I started out with early on in the game and simply kept improving, especially the one's I found with Legendary perks.

> - Having a bin to dump junk in that semi-automagically figures out
>what it's good for is nice.

Once you unlock Local Leader level 1, you can link settlements with supply lines. At that point, any junk in any workshop that's linked to the network is accessible at any station. Saves a lot of trouble, I've found, to be able to march to the nearest settlement, dump everything in a bin, and start working on gear. Also, you can make Settlers scavenge for you, which also helps.

> - No crashes to desktop so far! In FO3 I'd have had four or five by
>this point, and at least one corrupted save.

I've had a few days where the game decides to be a prick, but the game is also smart enough to autosave often, and actually has multiple autosave and quicksave slots. I've lost, at worst, two or three minutes on one occasion (Of course, that was after building a lot of nice stuff for Starlight Drive-in...)

> - Did anyone else notice that Codsworth says your name when
>you meet up with him again after the tutorial? (Or at least has a
>fairly high percentage chance to be able to do so?) I thought I
>imagined it the first time. That is pretty badass.

He's got about a thousand names in his collection. The list ranges from normal, to 'yeah, we know our players' (Vash, Furiosa, Fuckface, Boobies.)

> - It's cute how Bethesda tried to address their legendary tendency
>toward clunky UIs (lookin' at you, Skyrim) and, in doing so,
>made the Fallout UI clunkier than it was before. Though at
>least there are hotkeys for the different Pip-Boy modes you want to
>look at before you actually look at your Pip-Boy, that's nice.

Ugh, they really needed to put some more thought into that. ESPECIALLY the Misc category. God I hate hunting for holotapes! Instead, we're probably, just like Skyrim, going to need someone to mod a better interface for us. I do like the Pip-boys updated model though. All the buttons are in the right spot now!

> - No skills? Really? It's all stats and perks now?

Eh, at least a quarter to half of the perks are really just skills with a new paint job.

> - Did non-power armor really need to be this stupidly
>complicated? I'm thinking no.

The part that drives me insane is the 'oh no, these clothes don't fit under your armour' issue, which makes half the clothes freaking useless. This includes some of the unique stuff like the Minutemen Generals uniform, which has half decent stats on its own, but simply doesn't compare to a full suit of combat armour. In the end, I turned to mods and removed the 'can't wear that' limitation, then grabbed another mod to let me make over clothes armour invisible. Bah.

As a side note, if playing 'clean', join the railroad at least long enough to do the DIA Cache missions for PAM. It'll unlock ballistic weave mods for regular clothes, which really helps out.

> - Speaking of stupidly complicated, I don't get workshop mode. I
>mean, it's neat that they tried to include a town-builder subgame, but
>trying to play SimCity in the mayor's first-person view is
>just... no. Would it have killed them to go to some kind of god's-eye
>cam for things like building placement?

See above comments, User Interfaces, Bethesda, inability to do. It leaves the admittedly rather fun element kind of... incomplete.

Oddly, from a story perspective, it amuses me even more. My character wakes up, escapes Vault 111 and goes hunting for her son... and discovers that, while she's been frozen, the entire Commonwealth simply can't look after itself. She has to keep stopping to rebuild the country (Which is a part of the plot I adore) because these people certainly aren't gonna manage it!

"I'm not your heroic saviour, I'm your damn NANNY."

I suspect that, in the UF alternate variant that is my imagination, Kasumi would take one look at Azula's adventures, then proceed to do the exact same thing and hide on the Enterprise until it left orbit... of course, then she'd have the fear of 'Oh lord, I left them near sharp objects.'

> - This next thing is arguably something I screwed up for myself, but:
>I had a nice little homestead set up for myself in Sanctuary Hills
>before I went to Concord, and now these people have just moved in like
>they own the place. Fergus or whatever his name is is just blithely
>using all my workbenches and ordering me around like it was his idea;
>the others have taken over the adjoining house, which I settled in
>rather than my old one for convenience's sake and because hey, painful
>memories, you dig? But hey, gang, don't mind me, go ahead, use my
>bed, use my generator, eat my melon patch. I'll just go exile myself
>to the Red Rocket station and stay out of your way, shall I? Jeez.

GUH. I rebuilt my characters house with the exception of Shauns bedroom because OH GOD. I then walked in to find Marcy sound asleep in my bed. And when I woke her up, she proceeded to bitch at me about what a shithole Sanctuary is.

I swear, I'm this close to making a cage, luring a Deathclaw in, dropping her inside and locking the door. Hell, I could probably sell tickets. It'd get at least half the population of Diamond City making the march north.

> - This is a super-minor thing, but, I'm sad the game no longer draws
>your holstered weapon when you're not carrying it around in your hand.

This too, makes me very sad. Especially since I'm the guy that always plays in third person. My laser rifle should be on my back when not in use, thank you very much.

> - I'm intrigued by the evident fact that the one piece of lost Old
>World technology that post-War humanity cannot make for itself, most
>powerfully yearns for, most desperately seeks and most jealously
>hoards, without which all the New World's innovations are useless, is
>not nuclear fusion, not energy weaponry, not telecommunications, no,
>it's a decent adhesive. Not a future scenario I would have
>anticipated.

Cooking stations, under the utility menu, Vegetable Starch. Once you get crops and a few water purifiers going, adhesive problems are solved.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter