This is my last Fallout 4 playthrough, as in I'm dying and soon off to hospice. No need to read it. Just writing about my 6,775 hours playing/modding Fallout 4 experiences (at least according to Steam). My last hurrah, or gasp, as it were.

I cannot count the # of characters that I've played, some for quite a long time and many only so far as the mods worked together until they didn't! There's one in particular I remember quite clearly, my third longest played character named Kessler. When I mean third longest played, I don't mean my third character. This is particularly relevant as it gives you the timeframe of when that was because Transfer Settlements came out during that playthrough and then a week later . . . yup, Sim Settlements. Those heady days! I obviously added them the load order be damned!

Kessler was also the first character where I played with the Dustbowl mod (v0.3). Kessler was also the first character where I had Gasmasks of the Commonwealth and others. At the start he was a bumbling itinerant who never knew his parents, raised by someone I simply called Uncle. He needed chems to even survive the desert of the Commonwealth. However, over time he became quite a dusty desperado. I didn't want him to be the "settlement guy", but the game doesn't care about that. So, in his story, while he was doing the odd job he hooked up with Myrna to be her courier to the settlements, bringing/selling them supplies. In that way yes he was that settlement guy. He only had Home Plate as his, however. He refused quest requests from settlers, that sort of thing unless it meant he couldn't get the settlement for Myrna. 

Some mods didn't fit the character or the world, but I really wanted to play AND I hadn't previously played them. I eventually added them too part way through - Fusion City and Outcasts were all we had then. I simply pretended he was dreaming the events of those mods (lol yup, no real reason, just the way I wanted it to go). dustbowl was broken precombine hell, Boston was a nightmare to navigate that way, so if you've ever played Fusion City/Outcasts and know what I'm talking about when I say the word 'pimp', you know the pain. lol

Well, Sim Settlements came out and that fit the idea he wasn't the settlement guy. I obviously had to place the plots, etc. I still remember a few of those settlements, their layout, and some of the things that happened there. Places like Murkwater, Oberland, and this utterly obnoxious disaster of a build I put at Starlight against the screen. Didn't matter. I played that character to hell and back and then even more. The modlist was hefty and on my computer at that time it took a five solid minutes to load up a save. It took another two or three minutes just to use the holotapes to setup the various mods because those mods could NOT save their settings. Had to do that every time. Every. Damn. Time.

Did that matter? Not really. Kessler was a great character and his attitudes progressed very nicely from that bumbling itinerant to a dusty desperado quick as lightning with a pistol. Dear lord I loved playing that character. But as all things it became a little long in the tooth. I had no idea how I was going to 'end' his playthrough/send off, but that opportunity came in an instant and from surprisingly relevant vanilla mechanics. I don't know about you but I have some settlements I'd rather not bother with like Covenant and the Abernathy farm. No idea why Abernathy hit that list, but maybe I just got tired of going to Olivia. 

Anywho, Kessler had only walked through the farm on rare occasion in all that time, but without intending to or at that moment having ANY sort of plan about Kessler's ending I happened to walk into Blake's convo-circle. I remember being wholly surprised that I had never talked to him, but also I knew why. He talked about the raiders and his daughter, and the vanilla dialogue choices gave Kessler the perfect reply to Mary's death for his attitude. It hit me like lightning how I was going to end things with Kessler, but also continue playing.

Continue playing? I had a TON of things going on in the Commonwealth. Lots of settlements, the Dustbowl mod was amazing even if broken. I didn't want to stop playing, but I needed Kessler to have a beginning and an end worthy of all those hours. So being a thoroughly despicable dusty desperado the vanilla dialogue topic was to tell Blake his daughter was stupid for standing up to raiders/deserved her end. Blake of course was not having that and told Kessler to get off his land. In that instant, right then and there, I knew how this would go.

Kessler gunned down the three Abernathy folks and then decided he would just head west like he always intended to until there was no more west to find. That's his story. 

What really happened is that I stuck Kessler in both racemenu and looksmenu, gave him a new name and a whole new look. I was now playing a new character, an old wasteland preacher who hadn't seen the Abernathy family in a while and came to visit. He found their bodies still baking under the desert's hot sun. That preacher vowed to find out who had done this, not knowing the villain who had done the deed was going west across the U.S.

He set about looking for clues, setting up chapels at various settlements as was his original plan, and in that way I was able to finally bring Kessler to a specific end game and also continue playing in a new way that allowed me to complete some things I wanted done. No other character compared to that playthrough, but I've had many I remember and enjoyed too.

As for my Fallout 4 mods, well, they're super basic and in some cases they're xEdit creations! They're nearly all desert related, and I'm proud of them for what they are. Some of me lives on in other mods too, Sim Settlement add-ons, but not because I made them or participated in them. I once had a lousy YouTube channel. This was back before they went bonkers and started screwing over content creators hardcore. It had something like 4000 videos, not all Fallout 4, but definitely many characters worth. That all ended when YouTube sent me a nasty notice that apparently looting road leathers off a dead raider leaving her in her vanilla underwear (gasp!) was "porn". Yes, really. They deleted that entire channel. It was a lousy channel anyway.

So how does that apply to mods? Well, along the way I guess at the time the amount of YouTubers who were still covering F4 mods in their videos had dwindled to just a couple. I was only playing F4, not mod showcases or anything, but I talked endlessly about the mods I was using or saw as I played. Somewhere along the way a certain team of SS add-on mod authors watched some of those lousy videos. One of them was a mod made for me to keep Dogmeat the hell out of your way when looting (MJC Dogmeat AI Tweak). The other? Wasteland Ventures add-on for SS.

At that time I was playing and got their updates when they released. Somewhere along the way I noticed a plot with silt bean in it. I walked over being EXTREMELY curious (and I will tell you why in a moment, don't you worry . . ..). The plot was definitely silt bean specific, and turned out it was called the Universal Library Silt Bean farm. It came in various sizes too. I remember heading straight to their mod page to ask. Yup. They had created a specific plot for me because I had covered their mods and others in my various lousy videos. Universal Library was my screenname at the time. You will understand how this all came about soon enough IF you're still masochistic enough to be reading this far down.

In my many many videos I talked about my time in other games including F: New Vegas. I complained endlessly about never being able to find the coffee pots needed to craft coffee at those campfires. I could find the damn coyote tobacco and the mesquite pods, but I think in all that time I found coffee pots only once or twice. I talked endlessly about that. Then in F4, there was no coffee until mods came out. Although they required coffee cups, which were everywhere, they needed silt bean AND OF COURSE you couldn't farm silt bean. You had to go scampering in the wilds to find it. I bet in nearly every video or every other video I probably happened across a silt bean plant and I'd say, "SILT BEAN!" and talk about that damn coffee. 

Thing is I don't like coffee at all in real life, but somewhere somehow it became a thing in the Fallout series for me.

That's how the SS plot came to be, and I thank them again for it. Silt bean on the fly and coffee cups everywhere? Priceless. Hell, I even made a mod that changes the HUD display name of some vanilla plants so it would say Coyote Tobacco and mesquite! lol

Well folks, my time on this article is now up. I'm tired a lot. I haven't been able to do much of anything for quite a long time, but watching old movies I haven't seen in decades and playing random games like F4 and Anno 1800 have been fun and helped keep me thinking. All those hours playing this game in the years past had caused me to set Fallout 4 down for quite some time, but here at the end I was hoping that Sim Settlements 2 might release its final chapter. And they did! A few bugs got ironed out, and now Chap 3 is complete in my playthrough.

The save game available here is my literal last Fallout 4 playthrough, my one last time loading up the game. That final save on Nora, level 76 with Chapter 3 complete? All done now. Well worth it! Kinggath and his team of peeps did a great job giving me so many hours of content, going all the way back to SS's beginning in my third longest played character named Kessler. I miss playing that guy. 

When you wander past a silt bean plot don't hesitate to roast some beans and have a cup using the plots built-in roaster.

I hope you all have a good one.