That basketball court is really cool.  I wish I'd thought of that.  You've got some nice settlements going.  I like your double stacked guard towers, too.

And, yeah, this game can look really atmospheric at times, especially god rays and radiation storms.

Also, for anyone who wants an incredible gun, there is a Two Shot combat rifle for sale at Vault 81.  It's called the Overseer's Guardian.  I got my Two Shot in the wild but the mechanism looks to be the same.  Tool-tip is 180 damage with a .308 receiver.

Just found out something that made me feel kind of slow.  I don't know if it's just me but I never realized that you can get different Mk. versions of each turret when you're building, which increases the further south you go.  Looks to be mostly random.  When you bring up a turret to place, it might have Mk. 1, 3, 5, or 7 written on the side, with each one being an upgrade even though the "defense" value remains the same.  If you want higher, just back out one step and try again.  Sure enough, I have Mk. 1's at most of my settlements.  Gao!

Related to that, I had my first attack on Spec Island.  I didn't get to fire a single shot, though, as my turrets wiped out each pocket before I could get there.  The RPG and heavy laser on the front beach approach absolutely creamed three Super Mutants.  Poor bastards.

Murkwater Construction settlement seems to have a Queen Mirelurk spawn everytime I teleport there, which is hilarous.  She caught me completely by surprise the first time but the last time she had five turrets on her right away and got ripped to shreds.  Don't spawn in my settlement.

I just realized that I haven't played F4 for almost three weeks!

Some cool looking settlements in here, I like the concept but the interface is such a pain so I keep mine simple and easy for now. There will likely be some decent mods in the future that could make the whole building process much better.

Anyways; good work, people, I'll peek in from time to time and feast my eyes on your hard labor!

Awesome shots and great settlement as well. Those shots and the Russian text give it a real Stalker vibe.
Yeah, makes much more sense to put those windmills on the roof. I don't think mine do much with the 5 story building behind them lol. I wonder what happened to solar panels in the Fallout universe, never invented I guess.

Speak of the devil. I literally just bought that gun, last thing I did before quitting. I'm still investigating that place, so far someone lost a cat I agreed to find lol. After that sttraight back to Sanctuary to upgrade it and replace my neverending one. Losing no reloads for double damage is an easy trade off.

I also explored University point, good story indeed, and nice prototype laser gun. Still underpowered but since it doesn't need to be reloaded it's quite useful. I had over 2500 fusion cells saved up, so I pretty much use it as a gatling gun now, run backwards, keep firing lol. I googled that number that's written on a blackboard in there 89875517873681764x10^9. It somehow looked familiar, and it is. It's the energy of 1 gram of matter from E = MC^2. Great detail.

Do the higher turrets do more damage or is it only a different mark on the side? I never noticed it either, just dump a couple of defense 8 turrets around and move on. Actually I have been ignoring the other settlements for a while, failed "talk to settlers at ..." Talk to preston. I'm getting called to the principal's office :/

I have the ballistic weave option now. I can see why you want it on a hat instead, pretty useless on clothes. The armor value is slightly better, yet replaces all stealth bonusses, deep pocketed carry bonuses and stat bonusses. I have +2 str, end, cha, int on my armor. Hard for clothes to top that. Plus 25 rad resist on the Vault suit.

I also explored Dunwich borers last night. (East of the slog) Very nice buildup of tension, feels like some real exploration, although the pay off is not that big. (nice knife, but when do you ever use a knife) Play it without the battle music (if you had not turned that off long ago already) so as not to ruin the atmosphere.

My attempt at an atmospheric radiation storm shot

The different Mk. versions fire different ammo.  The highest ones are incendiary and explosive.

As for the ballistic weave, there are clothes that you can modify which you wear under your armor.  I was already using Dirty Military Fatigues under my armor for the +Str so now they're +100 damage reduction.  Minute Men outfit works, too, but I'm not sure what else.  Wish Bomber Jacket worked, it's my favorite outfit.  I tried it with a bunch of them to see which met both criteria but the Fatigues were the best.  Oh, and Baseball Uniform worked, oddly enough.

With Vault 81, all I've done is send the cat home.  I can't believe it listened.  I was going to continue the quest but then I got a notification that I "failed" a "Raider Problem" quest at Abernathy Farm.  The annoying thing is, I DID the quest, I just hadn't turned it in.  Blah.  Having to do the quest then sit through more loading screens just to tell the settlers that, yes, I did their little quest for them, that's enough of a pain that I put it off without knowning they'd fail me for it.

Tell Preston off for my sake.  I'm giving him the silent treatment.

^ It still fails if you don't talk to Preston, after talking to the settlers. It's ridiculous. I thought I could avoid Preston giving me a new assignment that way, It's dangerous to visit Castle too, before you know it, more timed quests.

Btw I'm traveling with Codsworth atm. He complains at every turn except in Vault 81 finally. He has some good jokes but it's probably time to trade him in. His built in flame thrower looks cool in combat although a bit dangerous when there's oil on the ground hehe.

It's unfortunate about the Castle.  I had plans for that place and had started a tower in the middle.  Now I stay far away.  I'd rather swim from Spec Island even if the Castle is closer to a quest objective.

Speaking of swimming, that "monster" in the bay had me quite amused.  I haven't done the quest yet but that "eye" caught me by surprise.  I put it off until later but then a boy on the dock gave me a quest for it.  

Curie is just so cute.  She says so many adorable things, like suggesting we file a police report after being ambushed by a mole rat.  That quest where you find her was a lot of fun, too.  Really gave off that "Aliens" vibe, though obviously not with the same threat level.  

I want to start over.  It's what I always do with Bethesda games.  I get really powerful, do just about everything except finish the main quest, then I start over.  Fighting it off for now.  I want my second play-through to be with full mod support.  It's also a lot harder to abandon my settlements now.

^ I haven't found the monster in bay yet. Didn't have that much time to play last night but I did finish Vault 81, another cruel story told through logs, and traded Codsworth in for Curie. I still need to go back to upgrade that new gun.

I still haven't visited battlezone yet for Cait, apart from that my map seems pretty much discovered. Hard to tell what I've missed though. I was trying to get into that zeppelin, couldn't find a way. Maybe it's part of some BOS quest. It seems there is something up there.

I had something odd happen at a settlement. Obviously, bugs aren't unusual but this was interesting.

I got a notification that the Egret Tours settlement was being attacked. I teleported in and right away there was an explosion in front of me. My rocket launcher turret was doing some work. It wasn't the limbs of an enemy scattered around me, though, but instead one of my own settlers. I cursed, reloaded, and teleported in again. Same thing. Settler parts flying through the air. I said the heck with it and went looking for the real enemies.

No one showed up, though. I ran all over and around the settlement. No baddies attacked and my quest notification didn't go away. It still said Egret needed help. What I did find, though, laying on the ground outside the fence, on the other side, was an Institute rifle. That was all. I'd never seen any enemies from the Institute anywhere around there, however.

So I went to look at that settler body a bit closer. And what did I find? A synth component. Yep, one of my settlers was a synth.

I don't know if they came in that way in order to spy or if they got replaced at some point but it appears that the synth are among my people. Can they not fool turrets, though? I don't know for sure or why that little event happened. I guess I need to build a cage for those who look funny. I've noticed some of my people walking off the settlement now and then, maybe I should follow them.

I ended up resurrecting the corpse a bunch of times and the same thing always happened. Sometimes my settlers would attack before the turrets. Doing that finally cleared the quest, as I think a certain number of attackers have to die. Lucky I'm on PC, I don't know how someone on console would deal with that.

The Institute is messing with the wrong Vault Dweller.

^ Haha, you're getting paranoid. I have been ignoring the under attack messages, I have an overpopulation problem anyway. I got to a point in the story that I have to choose who is going to help me. So before that I'm catching up with the Brotherhood of steel. First a bunch of simple quests, yet now I'm pretty overpowered I've been walking across the map everywhere and am still finding a new place now and then.

I settled for military fatigues with ballastic weave, defense value is now doubled and +2 agi. That double shot combat rifle works really well too. Currently travelling with Cait. This game is huge. My save game reached 7 days, and still finding new things.

I'm still finding a ton of interesting places, too.  Like that school building where everyone had a Blood Contract.  The computer logs were pretty sick and made me feel kind of bad about killing the raiders.  Makes you realize that some them probably wouldn't be bad guys if left on their own.

Big John's Salvage was really sad.  After reading the logs I realized they were probably trapped and then when I got down into the bunker, jeez.  You could see where they'd probably tried to dig their way out.  Then the two graves for the children and the parents laying down to die together was just horrible.  

Got into the Mayor's bunker.  That was sad, too.  You could see where the citizens tried to get inside but were gunned down by the turret.  

I love discovering random stories like that.

Random Sentry Bots are appearing.  They're really mean.

One shot killed a Behemoth with a Legendary Instigating .50 cal rifle.  I mean, damn.  Blew his head completely off.  Of course, the effect is only if they're at full health and I've failed to one-shot high level Supermutants that had been injured by BoS vertibird attacks.  

I want to assassinate that one BoS guy who acts like a jerk to me.