I have no idea how or when I 'unlocked' this feature, but now I'm somehow able to upgrade certain pieces of generic clothing that you find scattered throughout the wasteland.

I went to my armor workbench just to scrap some random gear that I had collected after doing a couple quests, and I noticed when I clicked "Craft" that there were items listed that were previously un-upgradeable.

For instance, 'Farmhand Clothes' or 'Clean Striped Suit' or 'T-Shirt and Slacks'. I'm sure you've seen them scattered throughout throughout the wasteland in various suitcases and dressers, etc. They have a base damage resistance of 0 and I honestly only had them in my inventory to equip on certain settlers when I assigned them to specific jobs so I could differentiate who was doing what. I could never uprgrade these types of clothes before and figured they were strictly cosmetic items... but now I can suddenly modify them, and it makes them totally badass.

I can craft them with something called 'Ballistic Weave'. There's levels 1-5 available. Level 5 brings it from a default damage resistance of 0 to an obscene 110 in both damage and energy resistance.

Not only that, I can modify certain goofy hats too. Like the 'Battered Fedora' or 'Trilby Hat'. Those also upgrade from 0 all the way up to 110.

And even crazier than that, it doesn't affect the weight of the items at all.

So my character now has 'Armored Farmhand Clothes' and 'Armored Battered Fedora' equipped and has a combined damage resistance of 240 and an Energy resistance of 210. Its practically the equivalant of wearing T-45 Power Armor... however, the two items I have equipped weigh a combined total of 3.5 lbs!!!!!

It's 1000x better than the crappy metal combat armor that weighes upwards of 100lbs after your done equipping each of your extremities seperately. Plus it allows for a ton of variety because I have at least 20+ unique types of clothes that are upgradeable now. The 'Baseball Uniform' is upgradeable, 'Tuxedo', 'Sweater Vest', 'Army Fatigues', etc. etc. And each of these items usually has a bonus SPECIAL perk like +2 CHR or +1 END and PER

I'm playing on PS4 btw, so its not a mod, its a feature of the game, but like I said I have no idea what triggers it.

Nice. I have tons of that crap in a workbench. The latest clothing I have is the greaser clothes from Zeke. My character looks pretty hot in those but the stats are shit. The only one of my outfits is the Silver Shroud one that got an upgrade by the guy over in Goodneighbor. I believe it's at 70/70 but the carrying capacity is shit. That's the only reason why I don't just stick with the SS outfit. Every component of my armor suit has deep pockets for better carrying prowess.

EDIT - The only actual clothing item that I have upgraded has been my vault tec blue suit. Any future upgrades on it I'll need to have my armor perk leveled up higher.

Decided to roam around a bit and stumbled onto the Covenant. That was a neat little quest.

I think my favorite quest so far was the one with the robot pirates and their ship.

[Some thoughts after 100 hours.]

I think the inconsistencies in the area design is interesting.

The worst ones are the linear designs with chained doors. The best one I've seen so far is . Multiple heights, elevations, levels, lots of ways to get from here to there.

The texture reuse(?) thing is weird also. "We did a subway texture so we need lots of subways." might be excusable, but the multiple stone quarries might be the best example. I understand why, it's just ... jarring? to be pulled out of the immersion.

The genericism of certain guns is a pain also.

It's STILL the best game in a long LONG time. I think it's interesting how they managed to bolt on so many things and still have a great game. Settlements, crafting, gun mods, costumes/attire ... it seems a lot of games have tried to bolt on the fashion of the month, and failed. Fallout managed to keep the fun parts without it seeming like a bolt on.


I've been asked by a couple of people (including my Fallout4-widow wife) what makes the game fun. I called her in to the room yesterday to look at something. I was in a park with a lake and tree in the middle. Standing up on the monument and looking around, at night, you can SEE things. Things that MAKE you want to go look at them and explore. A flashing red light. A bright white light over the hill, a dim green light in the distance, moving. This happens to be over and over again in the game. I want to go somewhere and I'm distracted by something else I see and am pulled away. And then pulled away again.

The various skeletons, and the ways/positions in which they died is sad. I'm sure I didn't get sad like that in other games. The people holding hands, drowning in toilets, obviously shooting themselves, and so on. The variety is really interesting. The despair in some of the radio messages is hard also, like the woman who was trapped in the safe without water. There's a lot of horror in Fallout. One of the loading tags is something like "like people everywhere they wanted a safe and happy life. Instead they got nuclear annihilation."

Yeah, the sad aspect of what the people wen through hit me a bit too - pretty impressive for a video game to do that. Things like that are scattered everywhere too.

Finally took the castle, which was cool. There's a freakin Legenedary Mirelurk there that I will leave alone, because there's only one Minutemen there working the radio station. I need some more supplies to build on that front, too.

Now that the radio station there is functional it will give me random missions to do, which is fine since I have not discovered everything yet. I played the Abernathy side quest and that one was pretty neat. I'm at a level 45 now and it's always cool smashing on level 1-10 Raiders. One shit kills most of the time.

As far as I could tell I have racked up about 8 days of gameplay, so that's 192 hours (8 x 24?) ? I'm not even sure how you can see how much you've played.

That's a cruel way to kill people.

This x1000. I have to applaud them for that.

With Fallout 3 I was done after 100 hours, the next 100 were just for fun
With Fallout 4, at around 60 hours, I don't think I'll be done at 100 hours. I mean I'm barely at Level 26 right now.


In the Xbox, and PC probably too, you can check the gameplay time when you try to load your saves.

Also, Diamond City Radio needs to report on the recent "cancer cluster" of people's heads popping off, spontaneously.

I'm about to take the castle at level 15 - is that too low?

One shit kills are the best!

Probably. You'll have a shit ton of Mirelurks and a Queen Mirelurk. That bitch is tough. I took it at level 45-ish.

That's the only time I've used my Fat Man. 3 shits, I think.

My only other big guns time was using all of my nuke grenades/mines on a Savage Deathclaw in a certain quest building.

I've yet to use the Fat Man. I did upgrade my Missile Launcher, though. That's how I've killed two of the 3 Queen Mirelurks I've encountered.

What if I take a power-suit - I have a lot of fusion cores that I've been stocking up on.

Um, yeah, definitely do that.

This article is a pretty well written summary of what Fallout 4 is...
http://kotaku.com/fallout-4-is-not-t...ith-1745651992

I've said it before but if Obsidian doesn't get a chance to do another proper Fallout game, I'll be pretty disappointed. These sorts of games are pretty rare nowadays and it'd be shame if Fallout doesn't do a course correction into becoming more of an RPG again.

Yeah, that should give you some padding but make sure you have powerful guns/weaponry.

I think I was around that level. It was a bit of a pain, but I was able to do it by doing a lot of hiding and healing between shots. The most inconvenient part is that all of the minutemen guys died, which made some of the following parts more of a pain than they would have been otherwise.

hmm... I think I'll hold off then - it's not like there aren't a billion other things to do in the game - I was just going through my list of objectives in order, and this was the next one up. It would be nice if they had "recommended levels" listed for each mission.

Ha, my Minutemen guys, with the exception of one (to monitor the radio signal) and Preston survived. Everyone else did not. I think it's programmed that way.

A found a Minutewoman cut in half after that battle was over. I think I did it around level 18 or so. Shot lots of missiles at it from up above.

Just roamed around for a few hours. Did some damage at the track and made it self destruct. That was fun. COmplete the robot side quest and completed two distress calls. I'm at Fort Logan about bust in on Kellog but am wondering what mission I should do first - kill Kellogg or finish the Railroad one. Since I have now discovered the Castle I can also place artillery canons at all of my settlements. Those are neat.

Awesome, thanks for posting this. I'm constantly blown away by the level of detail in this gaame.

I was about an 18 and did my fair share of running and hiding like a lil' B but it worked fine. I used laser guns, was up top to begin with but the second half I was down low and it's fairly easy to find cover, VATS a few shots, & repeat. It was an awesome level, and most of my guys survived.