Part 46: Pacifist Playthrough - Random encounters and Roaring Forest

Pacifist Playthrough - Random encounters and Roaring Forest



More tortured tormented references.



: I'm-a not answering questions. I don‘ like smartasses.

: Cool. Honestly, it's not likely that this mentally-challenged mutant has anything of value for low-int characters, right? Right?



: Right. Most types of alcohol have a 30% chance to lower your intelligence by -1. Effects can only stack twice per item, so we need several different types of alcohol (and a bit of save scumming).

: 1. [Intellect < 4]: [In a loud voice] Hello! Can I ask you a couple of questions?




: Arthur: So cool! Now I can kick anyone's ass! Yay!

: +25 (!) to Unarmed. Godsend to a black belt character, and available practically the moment you start the game.

: Heard any interesting stories?

: I practice fighting, exercise my arms and legs, practice blows... and there's this one guy —haha!— an utter fool! He only cares for one muscle, the one between his legs! Women from all over want to help him! They follow him everyplace, screaming, “Let me help you exercise!" This man's name is Tourist Korallov.

: Now let's head back in the direction of the Roaring Forest.





Random encounter, complete with LONG journal.





Apparently this is a creepypasta?



Another seemingly random encounter.



A dog and his owner are fighting a bunch of bandits.




The man gets killed, but I arrive just in time to distract the bandits and allow the dog to finish them off.



[You stretch out your arm warily to stroke the wolfhound, which turns out to be a huge mistake! The beast tries to snatch at you immediately. You're agile enough to dodge, but his sharp fangs miss your hand by an inch]




The man’s corpse has a collar on it, which allows us to befriend Dzhulbars (not that many people have actually watched the original film – it’s just a generic name for a guard dog now)



: Being a melee-only AI character, the dog is (per Fallout tradition) not actually that useful (without mods, at least). More to the point – since the fight starts on the other side of the combat map, getting him as a companion is stupidly RNG dependent.

During my previous attempt at a pacifist playthrough, I’ve spent half an hour reloading over and over, praying that RNG and AI coalesce into a successful outcome.

Most often, both dog and owner would just die. Some genius programmed Dzhulbars to spread his damage around – rather than taking out 2 almost-dead bandits in one round, he’d switch to the only fully healthy bandit and take him down to near-death, so that all three would be alive to bash him once his turn ended. I imagine some players had this encounter, had the dog die, and just... moved on.

Every so often, both dog and owner would survive. The owner would thank me for my help (of which there was none – there isn’t time to make it to the fight before it’s over, even if you have a decent ranged weapon at this stage) and move on.

At which point I’d just have to offer him a cigarette or two. Which isn’t really very pacifist.

On this exceptionally blessed playthrough, everything unfolded as intended on the first attempt – the owner died, and the dog took care of the bandits.
With that rant over – let’s move on to the Roaring Forest during the nighttime.



Two people are standing by the fire. Each has a separate dialog tree (this game doesn’t really do interesting experiments with more than one person talking), but I’m going to jump between them due to reasons.





: Yeah, my “weapon" is also bullshit.

: ’k. What are you guys doing here?




: All of that, of course, is nothing more than a thought experiment. However, for one of the prominent scientists of my lesser motherland, this theory has turned into a mania... Into a fanatical obsession to discover the bridge between our world and an alternative one... And to give our version of humankind an exodus to the universe where the devastating war of the 1986 never happened. Anastasia B.: After a whole range of suicidal expeditions to... the surface... This mysterious forest was unfoundedly named the junction point, the «sigil» of the multiverse.




: And somewhere there... Or rather, somewhere here... Here but not here. Here but on a different radio wave, there is an Earth where you were born with a different hair colour, with a different, excuse the vulgarity, gender... There is an Earth where you were never born, because your parents failed to meet due to some fateful trifle. There is even an Earth where this damn war has never happened...
…
This forest that the local peasants have nicknamed "Roaring" is one of such points. I've made such a long way from my homeland to observe it. Alas, so far I haven't detected the signs of the presence of the objects from parallel worlds. But now that I'm here, a discovery like that is just a matter of time!

: I volunteered for an expedition to this place to prove once and for all that our leader's theories are insane... To oust him for his own sake and for the sake of our community. And nothing will stop me.

: Wow... I see you hate this theory as much as your leader loves it!

: [The woman frowns, looks you up and down and sighs heavily]
Who are you talking about?




: So yeah, there’s a lot of para-natural stuff in the game if you look for it. Particularly in the Roaring Forest. (TGEK already covered the sacrifice to the idol and receiving the appropriate achievement)



More supernatural premonitions about the Digger bugs. The wiki claims that if you leave the wolves alone (you can get into the caves by going around them), they’ll eat the old couple after a few days. Didn't manage to trigger that.




You don’t need to engage with the Diggers or the Blind Death to exit the caves (you’ll get a cutscene showing off a single bug, which provides an explanation to the forest mystery, but you can easily skirt around it). A combat optimized character should have about 30 points in Thrown Weapons without investing a single skill point, but Arthur has to waste an entire levelup worth of skillpoints.



This gets us the “Indy” achievement.




The stone tool is moderately handy for a specific fight, but it can be improved with a bit of caveman cunning (granting us the Neanderthal achievement):




Cavemen were well known for their clever utilization of duct tape.
I head back across the rope, give Fidel the knife… and find out the Blind Death isn’t actually classified as a cosmic horror. My humiliating demise takes place off-screen.
I reload and take the alternate exit, past the caveman drawings. Thus far, we stood by while others have died in our place, and were utterly pacifist – not even our companions were ever required to kill during the questline.
Next time – I dunno. I might show off some things we missed in Otradnoye, or move on to KRZ?