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[Flying Dice]

There's a mod that lets you change all the various aspects of Survival to your liking.

There are two mods for alternate starts. One doesn't play nice with some other mods, I use the second one.

[SOLDIER First]

Here.

Cigarettes are usable and function as saves. By default they play a 30(or 60, I forgot)- second animation of your character taking a nice smoke break before saving. You can walk around and such but not cancel it.

[ZeroGravitas]

To be honest, this is the only game where the load times are a noticeable problem.  As you said, the damn textures keep getting bigger, and it's not like the old days where you just loaded everything into memory when you started the game, so you just had one big load at the beginning and then smooth sailing from there.

I believe no effort was made to streamline loading in fallout 4, because skyrim is running off a dvd on my xbox360 and the area transitions are a lot faster!  DVDs are a hell of a lot slower than HDDs...

I suppose I'd get faster turn processing in Aurora 4x on a SSD, at least assuming the actual I/O task is the bottleneck there, rather than the database driver.

I suppose I should look at getting a decent external SSD.  Especially since this problem is only going to keep getting worse (both more stuff to load and seemingly less effort made to streamline said loading)  I doubt I'd want my entire computer running on an SSD, just seems overly expensive for not enough benefit, but a 500 gig ssd could hold the few games that need the faster IO times.

I'll have to check whether my laptop does have a SATA port.

I haven't played Aurora 4x so I'm not sure about whether you'd get faster turn processing there. I would say that putting your OS on the SSD is one of the best things you can do, especially because you can and should do it using a relatively smaller and cheap SSD. There is some benefit to putting your OS on a separate drive from your games library, just logistically (for windows reinstalling/drive death/etc) but I've also been told for performance. Windows 10 is like, what, 25 gb? (for 64-bit). So there's a significant benefit you can achieve by investing less than $50 for a small SSD (60-100gb).

[Damiac]

What benefit would having the OS on an SSD have, outside of fast boot times and launching OS specific applications? I'd think everything else is read off the HD at boot, or when first called, then sits in memory from that point on, unless explicitly terminated. 

Now, having my swap file on an SSD makes sense, and maybe that's what you're thinking of? That gets used as "virtual memory", so depending on memory usage you could be spending a lot of time reading off and writing to the hard drive. I'd imagine a huge performance benefit from an SSD, although that's also beating on those limited writes, since that file is constantly being modified.  But a $50 ssd could probably last a good long time before it finally gave out, if I were just using it for that.

Maybe there's something I'm fundamentally not understanding, but is there actually a benefit to the OS on a SSD, aside from the aforementioned faster boot times?

[umiman]

What benefit would having the OS on an SSD have, outside of fast boot times and launching OS specific applications? I'd think everything else is read off the HD at boot, or when first called, then sits in memory from that point on, unless explicitly terminated. 

Now, having my swap file on an SSD makes sense, and maybe that's what you're thinking of? That gets used as "virtual memory", so depending on memory usage you could be spending a lot of time reading off and writing to the hard drive. I'd imagine a huge performance benefit from an SSD, although that's also beating on those limited writes, since that file is constantly being modified.  But a $50 ssd could probably last a good long time before it finally gave out, if I were just using it for that.

Maybe there's something I'm fundamentally not understanding, but is there actually a benefit to the OS on a SSD, aside from the aforementioned faster boot times?

I think at this point you should make your own thread about this. You seem really intent on trying to figure out a cost effective way to get an SSD and this is the Fallout 4 thread where we bitch about Bethesda being cunts and post pictures of grainy screenshots with nothing much going on. Then we jack off each other by trying to subtly prove we're smarter than one another.

We're a higher caliber of discussion than the optimum strategy for budget SSD utlitization in the year 2017.

[ZeroGravitas]

What benefit would having the OS on an SSD have, outside of fast boot times and launching OS specific applications? I'd think everything else is read off the HD at boot, or when first called, then sits in memory from that point on, unless explicitly terminated. 

Now, having my swap file on an SSD makes sense, and maybe that's what you're thinking of? That gets used as "virtual memory", so depending on memory usage you could be spending a lot of time reading off and writing to the hard drive. I'd imagine a huge performance benefit from an SSD, although that's also beating on those limited writes, since that file is constantly being modified.  But a $50 ssd could probably last a good long time before it finally gave out, if I were just using it for that.

Maybe there's something I'm fundamentally not understanding, but is there actually a benefit to the OS on a SSD, aside from the aforementioned faster boot times?

Aha, yes! The swap file. Thanks. I knew it was some kind of back-end thing but couldn't recall what or why. Is that the same as the page file?

But yeah, otherwise you're just looking at insanely fast boot times, and if your web browser is installed there, faster cache loading times.

I haven't really had an SSD "give out" yet and it's been a few years. I've had a few I "retired" - like my first 64gb SSD I turned into a USB boot disk.

[Damiac]

OK cool, yeah swap file/page file is the same thing, as far as I know, also known as virtual memory.  Thanks for the tips!  Sorry for the slight derail, it was tangentially related to complaining about Bethesda though, so I think I made it just under the wire.

Also, thanks for the mod suggestions.  Sounds like just what I was looking for.

[milo christiansen]

I have swap turned off. Windows pitches a fit (are your sure you want to do that?), but I have 16gb of RAM. Swap is not needed. If I ever run out of RAM Windows just kills the biggest user(s) until I have some free again. This only ever happened once when one of my other games go stuck in a loop and was crashing anyway...

Frankly, swap is a relic of days past, and should not be used on modern PCs IMHO.

Anyway, does anyone else hate the way the story makes you choose between brotherhood and railroad? I really wish there was a way to patch up their differences... A super hard and kinda hidden way maybe, but just having some way would be awesome.

(One thing I hated about F:NV was the brotherhood vs NCR conflict, the brotherhood was an importaint part of founding the NCR in the first place.)

[SOLDIER First]

Yeah, but when the brotherhood goes from being pretty cool guys in the Capital Wasteland to some weirdo tinpots touting lasers and sitting in a bunker with their thumbs up their asses, that helpfulness is a bit out the window.

[Telgin]

Anyway, does anyone else hate the way the story makes you choose between brotherhood and railroad? I really wish there was a way to patch up their differences... A super hard and kinda hidden way maybe, but just having some way would be awesome.

(One thing I hated about F:NV was the brotherhood vs NCR conflict, the brotherhood was an importaint part of founding the NCR in the first place.)

Hey, but at least it was possible, if difficult, to get them to form a truce in New Vegas.

But yes, I hated a lot of the story in Fallout 4, including this.  Probably a repeat of dozens of discussions in this very thread, but I kind of hated all of the factions and the ways they interacted.

The thing I hated the most though, was how the game kind of tricked me into blowing up the Prydwen for no reason.  After I "beat" the game, I got the little cutscene of blowing up the Institute, and then the game dumped me back into the world.  I didn't realize the game was technically over at that point, so when Preston gave me the quest to destroy the Prydwen, I thought I had to go through with it too to eliminate the Brotherhood to get the real ending.  Based on the way the game's factions worked, I assumed I had to eliminate everything but my chosen faction to get the ending.

Cue lots of slaughtering Brotherhood, Codsworth chewing me out and me feeling really stupid and irritated when nothing happened afterward.

Actually, it's been long enough now that I don't really remember how I even got to that point.  I'm pretty sure I ended up looking up how to just side with the Minutemen instead of any of the main factions since I didn't like any of them.  That in turn required me to use console commands or something to advance broken quest triggers...

...actually, maybe I just screwed the game up in the process.  I don't remember anymore.

[Jimmy]

The Railroad exists to emancipate synths, so if the Institute is destroyed, there's no more reason for the Railroad to exist either. Honestly, I've never seen them as a viable option from a roleplay perspective, so I've never sided with their faction.

One thing I've said before is that the Brotherhood really, really shot themselves in the foot by not negotiating with the Institute instead of destroying them. Institute tech would have been an amazing combination with the Brotherhood's paramilitary structure and really given them a shot at unifying the country again. Once Father and his Gen 3 obsession was removed, there'd be plenty of opportunities to go back to the Gen 2 models and improve them without worrisome problems like free will interfering with the results.