Tutorial / Q&A: If you're new to FO3

[Ricamundo]

Hello,

if you're new to FO3 (although it is not a new game) feel free to read Ricamundo's great tips. This topic is a spin-off, just click on the quote authors to jump back to the FO3 mods topic. That is what PZ refers to in the second post of this topic. Mods change your game, ranged from subtle changes to massive overhauls. I suggest you start vanilla at least until you've left the Vault 101, which serves as an intro and tutorial. After that, you may start playing with mods.

The Q&A part -- you've got the Q, we'll provide the A  ;D

/Art

I'm going to pick this game up tomorrow - but I'm gonna feel like I'm about 47 squares behind you guys (grabs head in a futile attempt to stop it spinning) ;D

Great fragger, but no worries, you;ll catch up quickly enough. Are you getting the vanilla(original) or GOTY? Either way, patch it up to 1.7 while installing. it might prompt you to do that, as well as installing or updating Windows live, which is what i had to do.

Once you've got the game up and running, you have a choice to make. Either dig in and start it up right from your character's birth thru growing up to leaving vault 101, or installing some mods right from the get go. if you start playing straight away, you'll be able to see for yourself if the vanilla game graphics are appealing enough. if you're fresh from an FC2 game, you may be a bit underwhelmed with FO3's graphics, but as i said, once you're out there, you will probably get carried into the story so deeply, you won't mind. 8)

A few quick tips..

Before you leave the Vault, scrounge around everywhere and take as much stuff as you can carry. There's stimpacks and other goodies in every health box, found on walls and randomly lying around. Anything health wise, you want to keep. Other suff, like tools, batteries, and scrap metal, are sellable, as is food, and booze. Refer to your pipboy often and you will see how much each item is worth and how heavy it is. When you walk out, get over to Megaton and see Moira in the Crater Supply shop, and prompt here that you want to buy.

This will bring up a 2 sided screen. On the left is all your inventory, and the vendor's on the right. first thing i do is look in the top right hand corner and see how many caps the vendor has to pay you for your junk. There's no sense in selling off 1000 caps worth of stuff, if the vendor only has 350. You can simply click on an item you dont want from your side, and  you'll see a running tally of caps with an arrow pointing to your side if you're selling or to the vendor's side if you're buying.

Early on, don't under estimate the value of junk you will find lying around out in the abandoned or destroyed building all over the wastes. Cartons of ciggies are worth 50 caps, and quite light. bottles of vodka are worth 20. I wouldnt bother with clothing, unless its armour, but then you might want it for yourself. In any event, collecting armour or big guns like miniguns, rocket launchers, etc, will quickly put you over your wieght limit. if you go overweight, you see a notice up on the top right of the screen saying "You are Over encumbered!" You can't move quickly at all and you cant fast travel either. So, when scavenging for stuff, go for small, light objects that will bring in good value, and pretty soon you'll have several 1000 caps saved up.

Hang onto things like bobby pins(lockpicking is very prevalent) rad away, rad x, stimpacks, and of course, small arms ammo, like .32, 5.56, shotgun shells, and 10 mm. Pick up several copies of the same weapon, and once you've upped your repair skills a bit, you can repair your weapons yourself.

Skill points on levelling up... every so often, when you aquired enough experience points by finding new locations, finishing quests, and killing things, the game pauses for a level up( if you go for the vanilla game it stops @ 20 levels, the GOTY pushes it up to 30 levels) In the first few level ups, i concentrate my skill points on things like Lockpicking, repair, and small gun expertise. Barter skills will help you get more caps when you sell stuff, or get repairs done by merchants, so that 1 is handy as well. Medicine skill get you more of a health boost every time you use a stimpack, and you will use a lot of those.

LOL, ive gone on and on. That'll do for a start. ;)

[PZ]

I gave up trying to get Broken Steel to w@&k, so i decided to start a new game right from the beginning. It was nice to come out of 101 in daylight this time, and have the huge advantage of pre existing hideouts waiting.

the 101 hideout was great to have, as was the Army Convoy just up the road. Hello 10 assault rifles, and 1000 rounds of 5.56, as well as some frags and armour. 8)

But the .50 cal sniper wasn't there near the V101 entrance. >:( How doea Artmod w@&k? I had given Charon all my weapons before i went into the chamber, but im sure he wont have those when i go back to underworld. Will he have them? I cant remember where i got them, originally :-[

@Ricamundo (and fragger too)
Too bad about Broken Steel - maybe we'll sort it out one of these days.

You might also consider the starter pack mod (I don't know if I posted a link yet) - it gives you a great start into a new FO3 world.  You might also consider the AS50 mod I recently posted - the graphics are great, as is the sound - it is quite powerful and is available for purchase from Moira.  It is now my favorite weapon because it has that realistic appearance, and great "boom".

As Art said, play with the order of your mods - you can organize the esms together and play with their position - I recently ordered them and much to my dismay, the game wouldn't start.  I fixed the problem by moving the esm mods to the end of the list so they load last (and take precedence).

Then don't forget to toggle archiveinvalidate when you are finished to ensure that all works properly - you can toggle that right from within FOMM.  Oh, another good one - FOMM will load a fake games live.dll which also helps stabilize your game - it is a setting.

[Ricamundo]

Im sorry i still dont understand the whole load order thingy. If they are at the bottom of the list, what of the mod index number? there's 2 lists in one there. One with a 2 digit number and one with a number letter combo. Then there's that fake Live dll tweak, where it says not to use it if you use DLC, but everything in the FOMM is DLC. :-\

I just wish i didnt have so much in game stuttering. I think that's the biggest down side to this game for me right now.

[Art Blade]

The lag/stutter is a matter you can't do much about. Even high-end rigs, such as PZ's, or near high-end, such as mine, suffer from those stutters and lags. Just live with it, or tweak the graphics down down down to get a rather ugly but halfways smooth FO3 ;)



The DLC stuff and the fake Live DLL just means, "don't fake a Live DLL if you're using DLC" (there are people like me who don't use any DLC, so I might use a fake Live DLL). So if you're using DLC, just don't press that button to fake a Live DLL. :)



The load order means, what you see on top of the list loads first, then every following .esp (mod) gets loaded afterwards. Ignore the fact that the count is hexadecimal, just remember the combo of numbers and letters, regard it as a fixed "code," replacing the count you know. Unless you remove a mod (.esp) the "code" will always be the same, starting with 00 for the game esp, followed by 02 03 etc for each mod.

If you had say 3 mods, you'd see the following load order in FOMM:

fallout3.esm 00
modA 02
modB 03
modC 04

Above, mod A is your first mod, B 2nd, and C 3rd. There's ALWAYS fallout3.esm as 00, so we don't touch that and we don't mention it any more. For now, ignore the "player.additem" -- this will be explained at the end of this post.

modA 02
modB 03
modC 04 (player.additem 04000001 99)

Now if you change the load order, replacing mod A with mod C, it looks like this:

modC 02 (player.additem 02000001 99)
modB 03
modA 04

You see, now mod C is your first mod, B 2nd, and A 3rd. The "code" is still in the same order and place, because it doesn't matter if you count three beers or three coffees, there's always a beverage #1,#2,#3. Here it's always 00,02,03,04 no matter the name of the mod.

When someone mentions the load order, it's more "where in the list is that mod" than "what bloody hex code has it got". The hex code may change, depending on the "where" in the list you look, but your mod will always be the same. You can tell if your mod is on top, in the middle, or at the bottom, because you're looking up the mod, not the code.

Practically it means, if you've got a new mod, modD, FOMM will placed it last (at the bottom) of the list:

modA 02
modB 03
modC 04 (player.additem 04000001 99)
modD 05

So far, so good. But, if for some reason some of your mods don't w@&k any more, you can try to move them up and down that list, by left-clicking on the mod without releasing the left mouse button, then drag it up or down the list, and release the left mouse button. Now the mod is in its new place.

Example: Moved modD to second place.

modA 02
modD 03
modB 04
modC 05 (player.additem 05000001 99)

The "code" next to the mod is only important if you want to use a cheat, like "player.additem" -- the item count inside a mod has got 8 digits: 12345678, where the first two have to be the "code".

[Art Blade]

One more thing about load order and its importance:

Imagine mods were colours. I know, it doesn't really w@&k like this, but it is good enough for a small example:

Fallout3 always overrides the mods that come first in the list with the mods that come afterwards in the list.
If you had a mod that produced red on your screen, it would be:

mod_red 02

Now if you have another mod and add it to the list

mod_red 02
mod_yellow 03

Three possible outcomes:
1 - you either get to see both red and yellow (that's what you wanted)
2 - you'd see only yellow (because yellow overrides red, so you don't need red any more)
3 - you'd see orange because both mods mix (usually you don't want that)

Changing the load order:

mod_yellow 02
mod_red 03

Three possible outcomes:
1 - you either get to see both red and yellow (that's what you wanted)
2 - you'd see only red (because red overrides yellow, so you don't need yellow any more)
3 - you'd see orange because both mods mix (usually you don't want that)

Remember Fellout and clear skies? They'd either override each other, rendering the one on the top useless because it gets overridden by the one that loads last (bottom of the list) or they'd mix, causing strange things, at least not what either one was supposed to do.

So, changing the load order has influence on what you get to see in the game :)

[Ricamundo]

Art, you're a lovely patient man, but it still looks like greek to me. :-[ I have Fallout as 00, then the addon DLC like OA, The Pitt, etc is after that like 01, 02 03 etc, then i have major mods that change the game somewhat, such as Fellout, Wanderers, respawn6hours, then the ones like Underground hideout, expanded megaton, etc, then the extra guns, like your mod, .50 calsniper, and so on.

I've played several hours of my new playthru this way and so far so good, so i think i'll let sleeping dogmeats lie. ;)

[Art Blade]

I'm not sure what you problem is, exactly. What do you want to do?

Just for fun, the mod load list looks like this:
(The mod names can be anything, the code always is in this order)

fallout3.esm 00
modA 02
modB 03
modC 04
modD 05
modE 06
modF 07
modG 08
modH 09
modI 0A
modJ 0B
modK 0C
modL 0D
modM 0E
modN 0F
modO 10
modP 11

[Art Blade]

Oh, and how you can play with decimal/hexadecimal:

Use your windows calculator, change to scientific view, and you'll see below the input/output field is a menu that starts with Hex and then Dec. Default is Dec (checked). Type in any number, say 10, then check HEX. Now the display of 10 changes to "A"... those are the secret codes you see all the time :)

or, check HEX, type 1+1= , and keep hitting enter. Now you can watch a hexadecimal count  ;D

[PZ]

I personally ignore all of the numbers, decimal or hex and just focus on where in the list the mod is placed.  If I have a problem like crashing to desktop, or freezing, I'll play with the load order to see how it affects the game.  Some mods will clash with others for the same resources and lock up the machine.

I found this info on Nexus and it seemed to help cure a crashing problem I had

Open up the fallout.ini file in: My Documents\My Games\Fallout3

Find the line:

bUseThreadedAI=0

change it to:

bUseThreadedAI=1

Add another line after it and insert:

iNumHWThreads=2

This will limit the game to 2 cores and prevent the engine bug from causing the game to freeze.

[Art Blade]

cool, going to change those lines, too :) Maybe I'll limit it to 7 cores  ;)

[PZ]

I limited to 6 cores and it worked well - have not tried to adjust it since.

[Art Blade]

yeah, should be interesting to see if it profits from multiple cores/threads

Edit:

I've replaced every 0 with 1 in variables containing "thread" (as in threaded or threads) and changed iNumHWThreads= to 4 (the i7 has 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores, should be fair enough) :) Runs smoothly, so far  :-X

Sometimes the usual stutter, but else... really smooth. No crash since.  :) :-X

[Fiach]

If you look for help with FO3 (or any game), ask more clearly than this guy on gamefaqs :)

i killed every body in the first town the blowerd it up and then killer evey but but the chang guy in the tower what now im lost

[Art Blade]

Well, you may ask exactly the same way, but you'll have to expect counterquestions, trying to sort the problem out first, and only then you can expect an answer that helps you. So indeed it is rather helpful for both sides if the question is simple and comprehensible ;)

[PZ]

Funny one, Fiach - I can't count the number of times I've seen posts similar to that one (although not as bad).  You'd think that the writer would not be able to read well enough to figure out how to start the game.  ;D

[Fiach]

Yeah, I like the ones that go ....... "I killed everyone, now nobody will talk to me >.>" ..... type of posts, you kinda wonder who ties their shoes every morning :)

I just

[Art Blade]

I only can think of those who send that kind of posts to be children.