Fallout: New Threadening

[Grim Portent]

The idea there seems to be that the Minutemen equipment never went away, just their organisation and infrastructure, such that ex-minutemen could open a locker or closet and gear up like the old days.

Thing is it's stupidly presented because no one is using the gear. As described the laser musket and a minuteman uniform should be something most settlements have a few of lying around, they were the primary equipment of a confederated militia that splintered into warring factions, the gear doesn't just evaporate and it's useful even if your militia consists of one town. Energy cells aren't the easist ammo to get, but they aren't exactly rare.

I think it would have made waaay more sense to have the Minutemen not be 100% dissolved, just splintered. Add a few settlements that claim to be the real heir to the Minutemen run by what are essentially local warlords who couldn't agree on who should be the leader and as such broke off from each other. A few regional Minutemen uniform variants, some quest chains to establish yourself as a uniter of the people, bring some named bandits to justice (perhaps add a way to actually arrest people so they can taken in as bounties Red Dead style) and so on. Minor settlements either gave up on the Minutemen entirely or just became tiny isolationists who don't trust the others. It would require more proper towns in the game to serve as faction bases.

[VoxRationis]

Frankly, the laser musket itself doesn't make much sense. It seems to imply that the main hurdle preventing the Minutemen from using laser weapons more freely is a lack of original stocks, and that they, for some reason in possession of a number of usable musket stocks, solved their problem with remounting the laser emitters. Changing the firing and loading mechanism also implies greater technical know-how and effort spent than just using laser rifles in their original form, all to make a weapon that is probably worse for the users and use cases it was designed for. Yes, the laser musket can be used to good effect, if you have the right attachments and you multi-load the shot and you have the time to do so and you have the aiming ability to make the shot you've invested multiple quanta of energy ammunition into actually hit the target. However, the users of the weapon are expected to be militia, not hardened soldiers who practice at a firing range all the time, and the enemies they're facing often move fast and irregularly, attack in melee, or both. Fighting bloatflies and bloodbugs is probably one of the more common encounters for settlers and those who would be called to defend them, and the laser musket is terrible at that.

One might argue that it was intentionally designed to conserve the limited amount of ammunition available by throttling fire rate, and it would do that, but mostly by ensuring the average user gets eaten by a radscorpion before he can get two shots off, and frankly, I don't see how a consensus-based militia organization could compel use of a weapon designed to benefit the organization at the cost of endangering the user so highly.

[factotum]

It would make more sense if the crank action actually replaced the use of cells, because a weapon not needing ammo would be a hella useful thing in the Commonwealth wasteland. Alternatively, it ought to do more damage when using the crank (as it already does) but not need the crank to actually fire, so if you need a quick, low-damage shot that's available.

[Rynjin]

I always figured the laser musket was just the laser equivalent of a "Pipe" weapon. The Minutemen have them because they know how to make them and laser weapons (in lore, though not usually gameplay) are simply better than regular guns. It would give them a tactical advantage to have ghettofied laser weapons when everyone else is using ghettofied guns anyway, even with the disadvantages of the slower fire rate.

[Cikomyr2]

I always figured the laser musket was just the laser equivalent of a "Pipe" weapon. The Minutemen have them because they know how to make them and laser weapons (in lore, though not usually gameplay) are simply better than regular guns. It would give them a tactical advantage to have ghettofied laser weapons when everyone else is using ghettofied guns anyway, even with the disadvantages of the slower fire rate.

I totally see how the laser musket can be seen as the "pipe weaponry of energy weapons".

But on the other hand, I think it cheapens the thematic value that Energy weapons are basically the really cool advanced stuff. There was a whole plot point in Fallout 2 about how a gang given these weapons basically started dominating all overs; because there's no such thing as a low-grade laser gun.

Like.. It's a bit silly, but I could see the Laser muskets actually being used by BoS militia auxiliaries. Now that would make sort of sense.


Let's be honest. Bethesda put the Laser Muskets just because they wanted to really espouse their Americana Revolutiona fetish. It's not a surprise that one of the starting game's set piece is a fight in a Revolutionary War museum.

Maybe if only the ***new*** minutemen, born in the fire of Concord, the Neo-Revolutionary look, and the Muskets were basically practical adaptations of prop guns..

[VoxRationis]

I think it would have made waaay more sense to have the Minutemen not be 100% dissolved, just splintered. Add a few settlements that claim to be the real heir to the Minutemen run by what are essentially local warlords who couldn't agree on who should be the leader and as such broke off from each other. A few regional Minutemen uniform variants, some quest chains to establish yourself as a uniter of the people, bring some named bandits to justice (perhaps add a way to actually arrest people so they can taken in as bounties Red Dead style) and so on. Minor settlements either gave up on the Minutemen entirely or just became tiny isolationists who don't trust the others. It would require more proper towns in the game to serve as faction bases.

Yeah, I agree. Fallout 4, in trying to streamline the player's way through the intended gameplay loop, flattened the behavior and characterization of NPCs in the game so as to put them into two camps: peaceable and hardworking settlers who need defending and intrinsically hostile raiders/gunners/other hostile NPCs, who can only be killed. Now, some of the environmental storytelling does make the raiders less than entirely homogeneous, but the player can never interact with their diversity. Moreover, the fact that these people only raid doesn't make sense because they're simply so much more numerous than the people they would prey upon and the richest targets are practically impervious to attack.

Really, though, all factions and communities should split the difference between "raider" and "settler." Any group of raiders that can sustain itself for more than a couple of weeks must have found a reliable source of food and water, probably through farming, and any group of settlers that can keep alive for more than a few weeks must have acquired weapons and the skills to use them, and will be inclined to use their weapons to settle disputes with neighbors and to acquire resources. Probably the most common sort of polity would be a group of strongmen ruling over a class of producers.

I always figured the laser musket was just the laser equivalent of a "Pipe" weapon. The Minutemen have them because they know how to make them and laser weapons (in lore, though not usually gameplay) are simply better than regular guns. It would give them a tactical advantage to have ghettofied laser weapons when everyone else is using ghettofied guns anyway, even with the disadvantages of the slower fire rate.

I understand that that's what they were shooting for, but it falls flat a bit, because while pipe firearms take things of limited intrinsic combat value (bits of scrap wood and copper piping) and make them into a usable, if basic, weapon, the laser musket takes what appears to be the functional elements of a military-grade weapon and transforms them into a cut-rate peashooter.

Let's be honest. Bethesda put the Laser Muskets just because they wanted to really espouse their Americana Revolutiona fetish. It's not a surprise that one of the starting game's set piece is a fight in a Revolutionary War museum.

Yes, this is the real reason.

[GloatingSwine]

You mean they took the only two things anyone knows about Boston and turned them into a core aesthetic for 2 of 4 factions?

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I will agree that the laser musket is akin to the pipe weapons: a deliberate anachronism that shouldn't function as presented. Pipe weapons are clearly supposed to be some sort of 'zip gun', but they appear to be able to fire reliably and consistently. But they wanted a mechanically inferior weapon to slot into their generalized weapon system that can be had at low levels without disrupting the overall balance they intended. And then proceeded to make an absolute mess of anything remotely resembling game balance, but I digress.


Retro-futurism aside, the laser musket is one of the more potentially powerful energy weapons in the game, capable of almost matching a gauss rifle in raw damage output on a per-shot basis, and the highest damage per shot potential of any weapon using Fusion Cells (barring legendary affixes). The problem is, as has been pointed out, the rate of fire and the consumption of energy cells per shot, which runs contrary to the intended design and purpose.

Personally, I would have had them similar to the recharger pistol/rifle found in F:NV, an energy weapon which does not require ammo. Instead of the Recharger pistol/rifle's limitation of being the weakest energy weapon available, it has the drawback of being a manual-crank weapon. As has been pointed out, an energy weapon which doesn't need ammo would be an extremely useful weapon, and entirely worth the drawbacks for a poor militia who do not have the resources to stock ammo, despite the drawbacks. This would certainly be an innovation that someone in a post-apocalyptic setting might try, and the minutemen would certainly be interested in such technology. From that perspective, it actually makes a degree of sense.

Honestly, I'd also like to see a version which is a semi-auto, where you keep cranking and on each crank it fires off a shot. This gives it an acceptable rate of fire in exchange for lower damage output per shot, perfect for handling soft targets like your common raider. Drawback being with the... let's call it the 'continuous' receiver, you can't store up multiple charges to deal with heavily armored targets like mirelurks. So you would have different setups for different members of a Minuteman squad. One or two would be the 'heavy guns' with a 4x or 6x crank gun for heavy stopping power against single targets, while the rest would be equipped with continuous guns to deal with ordinary threats.

Granted a full-on Laser Rifle would probably be better than a continuous-crank laser musket, however it also runs on Fusion Cells and are much less common. So tradeoffs. It would still fill the same role, but do so a lot better and with a valid reason for its existence.

Then again, there should also be a bigger difference between Laser weapons and the Institute variation thereof other than 'the Institute's version is straight-up inferior', because they are designed with two different purposes in mind. The stock Laser Rifle was intended as an infantry sidearm, and as such conformed to certain requirements. I'll actually forgive the boxy mass produced look because let's face it... that's exactly what it was, an attempt to produce a serviceable weapon in a short period of time. See also: the M3 'Grease Gun' or the Sten Gun or the Owen as replacements for the hard to obtain and extremely expensive Thompson SMG to fill the same role.

The Institute, however, favors form as well as function, it should be sleeker, more custom-looking. We should also look at its use-case and how it differs from the standard version.In fact, I would go so far as to say that the gen one synths that are your common grunt of the institute are probably equipped with bog standard laser weapons, only coursers and other operatives get access to the Institute specific version. As it is designed as a special operations weapon, it has a higher damage in exchange for a smaller magazine. It has no full auto, but has increased accuracy per shot, and even the scatter option has a smaller spread. After all, the Institute had access to pre-fall tech, it makes no sense that their version would be less capable than the standard version. However, it would also make sense that they would reserve their private stash for their operatives, because while they have made improvements in laser technology, they don't have the fab shops to produce them en masse.

[Grim Portent]

Institute lasers do fire slightly faster than normal ones, but fire rate is less valuable than damage 99% of the time so the big damage drop makes it not worth it.

It would have been nice to see more use of weapon mods by enemies. Coursers with IL sniper rifles, heavily armoured synths with scatter lasers. Instead the Institute basically always uses pistols, rifles and the automatic version of each. Quite a boring distribution.

It's a missed opportunity to not give the enemies access to all weapon mod combinations when generating them. You never see an enemy with a MIRV Fat Man, or a Quad Launcher. It would add a little element of spice when the respawning high ground explosives mutant/gunner/raider that appears in a few places had some variety in what they could spawn with.

[Rynjin]

I mean yeah, obviously, the laser musket is there for the aesthetics, but usually discussing The Doylist reason for an in-game choice isn't the most interesting topic. =p

I understand that that's what they were shooting for, but it falls flat a bit, because while pipe firearms take things of limited intrinsic combat value (bits of scrap wood and copper piping) and make them into a usable, if basic, weapon, the laser musket takes what appears to be the functional elements of a military-grade weapon and transforms them into a cut-rate peashooter.

I think it makes sense if you figure they're salvaging destroyed weaponry. If everything except the battery pack is mangled, then it makes sense to slap it on a hunk of wood and throw a new focusing crystal or whatever on it (which is what the big glass thing is for I think).

The "functional elements" of a laser weapon still need a bunch of extra bits to work, same as any other gun.

It could have been done better mechanically/functionally but I think as a concept it's pretty neat.

[Grim Portent]

I would have actually had the laser musket be a marksmans weapon, based on tech being developed pre-war as an experimental variant that never went into mass deployment. Bunch of them made, possibly due to a corrupt military official, but never approved for actual field use. After the bombs fell, and things had a while to go bad, the remnants of the military and engineers who were scraping by like everyone else distributed the laser muskets to the other survivors, because there's no point in letting serviceable weapons rot in a lab somewhere.

Due to their slow rate of fire they were best given to people who served as hunters and sentries, those with good aim and steady heads. Over time they started to wear out, and lacking the infrastructure to repair them properly, the survivors instead improvised and managed to create the sub-par but functional laser musket seen in FO4. Thus, the laser musket became a staple weapon of the post-war inhabitants of Boston and eventually became the favoured weapon of the Minutemen for that very reason.

Add some meat to the rather bare bones in universe reasoning to the presence of the laser musket.


Have a somewhat senile ghoul engineer from pre-war who was involved in the project, and in figuring out how to keep them running with substandard materials who can pass along patchy bits of information about the process things took. Perhaps a quest to get a near fully functional musket from pre-war as a badge of legitimacy for the player as the new leader of the Minutemen, with it essentially serving a similar mechanical niche to the anti-material rifle or gauss rifle.


Hell, you could even have someone explain why the Minutemen dress like a bunch of cosplayers, responding to the player commenting on their appearance with something like 'If you want to trudge through miles of freezing mud in that radioactive wasteland in a sweater and a pair of loafers feel free. Me? I'll keep my longcoat and boots'

[Cikomyr2]

I would have actually had the laser musket be a marksmans weapon, based on tech being developed pre-war as an experimental variant that never went into mass deployment. Bunch of them made, possibly due to a corrupt military official, but never approved for actual field use. After the bombs fell, and things had a while to go bad, the remnants of the military and engineers who were scraping by like everyone else distributed the laser muskets to the other survivors, because there's no point in letting serviceable weapons rot in a lab somewhere.

Due to their slow rate of fire they were best given to people who served as hunters and sentries, those with good aim and steady heads. Over time they started to wear out, and lacking the infrastructure to repair them properly, the survivors instead improvised and managed to create the sub-par but functional laser musket seen in FO4. Thus, the laser musket became a staple weapon of the post-war inhabitants of Boston and eventually became the favoured weapon of the Minutemen for that very reason.

Add some meat to the rather bare bones in universe reasoning to the presence of the laser musket.


Have a somewhat senile ghoul engineer from pre-war who was involved in the project, and in figuring out how to keep them running with substandard materials who can pass along patchy bits of information about the process things took. Perhaps a quest to get a near fully functional musket from pre-war as a badge of legitimacy for the player as the new leader of the Minutemen, with it essentially serving a similar mechanical niche to the anti-material rifle or gauss rifle.


Hell, you could even have someone explain why the Minutemen dress like a bunch of cosplayers, responding to the player commenting on their appearance with something like 'If you want to trudge through miles of freezing mud in that radioactive wasteland in a sweater and a pair of loafers feel free. Me? I'll keep my longcoat and boots'

It'll have been nice to have actually some of that lore in the game. You know, an intelligence report by the Institute that tries to explain the Minutemen's aesthetic and weapon of choice. But who ever seen a lore drop in a FALLOUT game?

[Mechalich]

Moreover, the fact that these people only raid doesn't make sense because they're simply so much more numerous than the people they would prey upon and the richest targets are practically impervious to attack.

This has always been a problem, one of the fundamental tensions between a game that demands a truly hideous number of targets for the player to kill, and a post-apocalyptic world that relies upon some number of people actually surviving somewhere. FO76 actually comes closest to getting it right - the initial raider population (rich d-bags in a bunch of ski resorts) is small, while the initial survivor population (most of the people in WV) is large, but a series of successive follow-up apocalypses both reduces the survivor population and causes ever more people to convert to the raider lifestyle despite extraordinarily high raider casualties. Conflicts between raiders and the various settler survivor factions ultimately weakens both groups, most notably via the destruction of the Charleston dam and the subsequent flooding of the city, so that neither one has the strength to stand against the Scorched after the BoS collapses.

It's still possible to look at the FO76 map and consider how, if the Scorched (and the Super Mutants and the Mole Miners, and various other organized nasties) did not exist, that the situation would hit stability with a handful of raider enclaves in the central mountains preying upon a much larger lowland population in the east and west.

FO3 and FO4 both have the problem that they are largely wedded to an urbanized setting, with all of the various in game factions crammed into the ruins of a city, and that doesn't really make any sense at all. The cities should be mostly dead zones, patrolled by robots and monsters, with all the people in the suburbs and rural areas where arable land can still be found. There are hints to this, especially in FO4 where most of the settlements are some distance from downtown, but the layout still doesn't work.

[MCerberus]

I want to know what was supposed to happen to the second wave of settlements in West Virginia. Currently in the story, there are enclave kill squads killing scorchbeasts as they pop up after having killed the matriarch, the blood eagles and mothmen are going to get killed by attrition because they don't have access to Nuka Cola: My blood is in it, the raiders are not only putting down roots including agriculture but are clearing house against the more destructive factions, foundry is thriving, and the super mutants are known and reducing quantity.

And the region is using federal reserve notes. The region is the Overseer deciding to reform the Responders away from holding hands singing around the campfire.
I mean there is the occasional vault dweller with a Saw-style murder dungeon, but what are ya gunna do?

[LibraryOgre]

Just finished my first trip into the Institute, and the game got stupid. Desdemona is demanding that I side with them over the Minutemen, and I'm like "Why can't I do both?"

I swear, Bethesda games need tabletop RPGs to allow you to overcome the inanity.

[factotum]

There really isn't any good reason why the Minutemen and Railroad should be enemies, to be honest. BoS you can argue that they want to be the sole powerhouse in the Commonwealth and the Minutemen act as another power bloc that gets in the way of that, and obviously the Institute are pretty much hostile to all surface organisations, but never got the animosity between Railroad and Minutemen.

[LibraryOgre]

There really isn't any good reason why the Minutemen and Railroad should be enemies, to be honest. BoS you can argue that they want to be the sole powerhouse in the Commonwealth and the Minutemen act as another power bloc that gets in the way of that, and obviously the Institute are pretty much hostile to all surface organisations, but never got the animosity between Railroad and Minutemen.

The closest I can get from Desdemona is she thinks the Minutemen, being from the Commonwealth, hate Synths, which has a ring of truth... "Hope you aren't one of those synths" is a common bit of dialogue from your settlers.

But, sweet monkey, this is annoying. To say nothing of the Far Harbor problem... i.e. "I have connections to a group of liberated synths up north. Please stop brain-wiping people and send them there." Or, hey, "I have control of a massive amusement park, recently emptied of hostile forces. Start sending synths there."

[Cikomyr2]

The closest I can get from Desdemona is she thinks the Minutemen, being from the Commonwealth, hate Synths, which has a ring of truth... "Hope you aren't one of those synths" is a common bit of dialogue from your settlers.

But, sweet monkey, this is annoying. To say nothing of the Far Harbor problem... i.e. "I have connections to a group of liberated synths up north. Please stop brain-wiping people and send them there." Or, hey, "I have control of a massive amusement park, recently emptied of hostile forces. Start sending synths there."

The one thing i dont get is the thematic discontinuity between the people who know who are synths and the hatred the Commonwealth has for institute Synths.

People fear synth as a stand in for the Institute. They are basically the eternal shadowy hand. But people like Vic and most escaped synths are synth only in blood, not as part of that shadow hand. Why hate people who claim openly they are synths?

[Triaxx]

On synths: Partially the uncanny valley effect, something so very human like being a terrifying prospect, and partially having been told that they can be reverted at a command, (which we see happen), and so at any moment they could receive a signal that reverts them and they go on a killing spree. Which like... has happened before. I suppose it's only gameplay reasons and simply not having enough of them that there's anything not a synth alive on the surface.

On the laser musket: The simple answer is to have the basic Capacitor be instead: The Power Horn. Each turn of the crank fires a single shot from the musket, but uses no cells. And each of the upgrades after uses fusion cells for more powerful charging effects.

[factotum]

A lot of the anti-synth fear in the Commonwealth goes back to the Diamond City incident, where a synth indistinguishable from a human killed something like a dozen people at a Diamond City bar. Now, we know from reading the actual Institute internal records that this was not intentional--a prototype synth just went mad and decided to kill everyone--but the people of the Commonwealth don't know that, and they're hardly likely to believe the Institute if they were told; there would at least be questions about why they'd implanted the synth in the first place!

[Grim Portent]

The one thing i dont get is the thematic discontinuity between the people who know who are synths and the hatred the Commonwealth has for institute Synths.

People fear synth as a stand in for the Institute. They are basically the eternal shadowy hand. But people like Vic and most escaped synths are synth only in blood, not as part of that shadow hand. Why hate people who claim openly they are synths?

Fear that they may be working for the Institute despite saying otherwise perhaps? It would actually be a neat trick for the Institute to release several agents under the guise of being escaped synths.

It's kind of like someone saying 'I'm an ex-spy,' you'll always wonder if they were lying, either about the spy part or the ex part.

[LibraryOgre]

Fear that they may be working for the Institute despite saying otherwise perhaps? It would actually be a neat trick for the Institute to release several agents under the guise of being escaped synths.

It's kind of like someone saying 'I'm an ex-spy,' you'll always wonder if they were lying, either about the spy part or the ex part.

To a degree, I think the fear of synths makes sense... but it's about on par, ethically, with the Institute saying "No, these self-aware robots we made aren't real people, so it's ok to treat them like garbage."

I'm constantly amazed that there's no way to tell a synth until its dead. Like, X-rays are a thing. MRI. I'm pretty sure Fallout Tech should be able to distinguish them.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

The one thing i dont get is the thematic discontinuity between the people who know who are synths and the hatred the Commonwealth has for institute Synths.

People fear synth as a stand in for the Institute. They are basically the eternal shadowy hand. But people like Vic and most escaped synths are synth only in blood, not as part of that shadow hand. Why hate people who claim openly they are synths?

Fear and Intolerance, by definition, aren't logical or rational. People fear synths in a visceral 'you don't know if your neighbor is one of *them*' sort of way. Couple with a couple of very famous incidents wherein synths commit mass murder (by accident or by design... the treaty thing was another incident besides the Diamond City incident and while the Institute claims that was an oopsie, it also handily destroyed any chance of a cohesive governing body forming on the surface), and you have the perfect boogyman. Honestly, the only thing I'm surprised about is that the mayor of Diamond City isn't beating the panic drum in order to get everyone following him in a tactic used by pretty much every tyrant ever in human history.

Vic is an exception because he doesn't look human, he looks like a robot with plastic for skin. He falls well before the uncanny valley, not unlike WALL-E. He could never try to pass himself off as a human realistically, anyone who looks at his face would instantly know the difference. Also Vic is an individual that Diamond City has gotten to know. While some probably still fear he might go off one day, he's at least not going to be replacing anyone and he doesn't hide what he is.

The problem is that the Gen 3 synths aren't actually synths... they're basically clones with a wetware chip in their head, if I'm understanding it correctly. Which is why it is more difficult to determine if they are a synth or not. The chip is a lot harder to spot than a full on metallic skeleton. Granted, it should still be absolutely trivial to anyone with decent resources, an MRI or CAT of the head should trivially turn it up, much less whatever device they use in the Memory Lounge, but that's large hardware with a decent power budget and maintenance requirements. Places like Diamond City might have one, maybe Goodneighbor, but just random dudes out in the wastes trying to eek out a living? No way of knowing.

Then again, since every synth is basically a clone of Shawn, it would be pretty easy to run a genetic test against known factors. Granted, the player would generate a false positive much of the time, which could cause all kinds of entertaining misunderstandings. That would require a lab and time, but not beyond the tech available to the more advanced locations. At a bar minimum, the BoS should easily and trivially be able to tell, and they'd be just the type to run a synth check every six months on a rotation just to keep the fear of synths present under the excuse of security. Which would probably shoot Danse's backstory in the head, not that it made any sense to begin with as there was no opportunity to replace him at any time.

On synths: Partially the uncanny valley effect, something so very human like being a terrifying prospect, and partially having been told that they can be reverted at a command, (which we see happen), and so at any moment they could receive a signal that reverts them and they go on a killing spree. Which like... has happened before. I suppose it's only gameplay reasons and simply not having enough of them that there's anything not a synth alive on the surface.

That's also why the Railroad are a bunch of idiots. It doesn't matter if their memory is wiped or not, an Institute agent can, at any time, basically use a Factory Default Reset button. In effect, all you are doing is spreading synths all across the commonwealth with deep covers that not even the Institute could provide. In effect, they're doing the Institute's job for them.

[LibraryOgre]

That's also why the Railroad are a bunch of idiots. It doesn't matter if their memory is wiped or not, an Institute agent can, at any time, basically use a Factory Default Reset button. In effect, all you are doing is spreading synths all across the commonwealth with deep covers that not even the Institute could provide. In effect, they're doing the Institute's job for them.

Yup. Tinker Tom should be in the business of removing factory reset codes.

Insidious Institute idea: send out eyebots that blast recall codes of known defecting synths. If they have hearing that extends above human ranges, send out a normal message, with the recall codes at the higher frequency.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Yup. Tinker Tom should be in the business of removing factory reset codes.

Insidious Institute idea: send out eyebots that blast recall codes of known defecting synths. If they have hearing that extends above human ranges, send out a normal message, with the recall codes at the higher frequency.

Nah, that just sends people on random murder sprees. Evil for the evlulz, and I suppose it's about the Institute's speed, but if you want a real insidious idea, simply ping and record the locations of synths using the same signal. Don't actually send the factory reset, but make a note of any devices who successfully handshake with it. Then later, when you want something done, you know exactly which one to reach out to in order to get it done discreetly.

Now you have an inventory of disposable assets for one-off disruption of whatever needs disrupting in order to prevent any body organizing into something capable of interfering with our long-term plans. One that, if they do go off, will only lead back to the Railroad, not yourself.

[Triaxx]

So... I'm unsure if you've finished the main F4 quest yet. If you have, go back to diamond city. If not, and you don't object I'll spoiler the answer to the mayor for you below.

Spoiler: The Riddle of the Mayor

Show

The mayor IS a Synth. So that's why he runs around telling people there's no such thing as the institute and they're all dumb for believing it, ha ha, evil laughter here. After the main quest, if you didn't side with the institute, he's been outed and is holed up in his office.

[Grim Portent]

Nah, that just sends people on random murder sprees. Evil for the evlulz, and I suppose it's about the Institute's speed, but if you want a real insidious idea, simply ping and record the locations of synths using the same signal. Don't actually send the factory reset, but make a note of any devices who successfully handshake with it. Then later, when you want something done, you know exactly which one to reach out to in order to get it done discreetly.

Now you have an inventory of disposable assets for one-off disruption of whatever needs disrupting in order to prevent any body organizing into something capable of interfering with our long-term plans. One that, if they do go off, will only lead back to the Railroad, not yourself.

The recall codes don't make Synths go psychotic, it just makes them stand still and do nothing so they can be brought back and reset to factory default. Mark's eyebot idea would basically result in every rogue synth in the Commonwealth entering a coma the moment they heard a subliminal message.


Which would actually make a lot of them easy to find, just make a synth who's role is a travelling doctor. Any rogue synth that has friends/family able and willing to care for them is going to ask a doc to take a look, the doc can then tell it's a synth and let the Institute know to pick them up after a random time interval. Raider boss that goes comatose probably gets a knife to the throat, and a lot of travelers would just drop in the wilderness and get killed by wildlife, but people in towns/settlements would probably be caught out.


Another option, and the one I would go with, is to offer a bounty on synths. Set up an organisation designed to hunt synths, under the guise of opposing the Institute but actually being tasked with the retrieval of rogue or dead synths. Pay out stuff like water, energy cells, bullets and so on for any synth, alive or dead, with a bonus for gen 3s. Public line is that the synths get dissected and/or deprogrammed to make it easier to detect them, but really other than a few splayed out ones and the odd broken gen1/2 on display they just get sent back to the Institute for repurposing or recycling.

'Course if I was running the Institute the synths would be intermediaries, not spies. There's bugger all worth spying on after all. Send a few synths to negotiate contracts to test new crops and other biological stuff on the surface, coursers acting as security for suface missions, all above board and mutually beneficial. Synths as slave workers, not infiltrators. 'Spy' synths would be more interesting as a testing field for determining if synths have reached human level sapience or not, make them, put them in the world with a fake personality and see if they turn out different from normal people or if they remain indistinguishable from human over time. Maybe even recreate an entire family, down to their farmstead, on opposite sides of the Commonwealth and watch how the synth version acts compared to the human one. Creepy and invasive, but not pointlessly murderous.

[VoxRationis]

The problem is that the Gen 3 synths aren't actually synths... they're basically clones with a wetware chip in their head, if I'm understanding it correctly. Which is why it is more difficult to determine if they are a synth or not. The chip is a lot harder to spot than a full on metallic skeleton. Granted, it should still be absolutely trivial to anyone with decent resources, an MRI or CAT of the head should trivially turn it up, much less whatever device they use in the Memory Lounge, but that's large hardware with a decent power budget and maintenance requirements. Places like Diamond City might have one, maybe Goodneighbor, but just random dudes out in the wastes trying to eek out a living? No way of knowing.

Then again, since every synth is basically a clone of Shawn, it would be pretty easy to run a genetic test against known factors.

Minor point of clarification here: we see in one of the Institute's chambers that the synths are not quite clones. They're made from cloned tissue, but they're assembled by machine from that tissue onto what superficially looks like a plastic and metal skeleton (but probably isn't, because that would be trivially easy to detect). Presumably, things like hair and skin tone are altered by increasing or decreasing the number of melanocytes per unit volume of tissue, rather than by altering the activity of those cells, so one could detect a synth by comparing skin tissue samples under a microscope, which would require only some glass and a metal frame.

That said, the lore of how synths work on a cellular level and why they had the "prerequisite" they did is based an absurd understanding of biology, so I don't know how deep we can really get into them with a straight face.

[Cikomyr2]

Minor point of clarification here: we see in one of the Institute's chambers that the synths are not quite clones. They're made from cloned tissue, but they're assembled by machine from that tissue onto what superficially looks like a plastic and metal skeleton (but probably isn't, because that would be trivially easy to detect). Presumably, things like hair and skin tone are altered by increasing or decreasing the number of melanocytes per unit volume of tissue, rather than by altering the activity of those cells, so one could detect a synth by comparing skin tissue samples under a microscope, which would require only some glass and a metal frame.

That said, the lore of how synths work on a cellular level and why they had the "prerequisite" they did is based an absurd understanding of biology, so I don't know how deep we can really get into them with a straight face.

Also, id argue they arent actually on par with humans when they dont care about mimicry. Glory clearly states that Synths are physically superior to any other.

I guess what also frustrate me is the constellation of cool locations of people and events that will never have any interaction with each other, no matter what.

Its not explained if Old Man Stockton's synth daughter is an Institute agent meant to infiltrate his cell of the railroad

We cant let the Brotherhood know about the unprecedented breakthrough the Covenant scientist have achieved in Synth detection.

And so on. Anything just exists in its own vacuum, disseminated across the map like youd expect an old school RPG would disseminate locations, but you get to see the 200 Yards that separate a defenseless settlemen from the ghoul infested yard, and everyone is fine with that.

[NeoVid]

And even after the armies of Raiders and Gunners I killed, I didn't find a synth component on a single one of them. So I suppose if you want to be completely certain the people around you aren't synths, go Raider?