Hey everyone, my name’s tomatoanus, also
known as the Air Bud of Speedrunning, and
this is an Any% speedrun of Fallout 4.
So, it’s been awhile since I’ve done a
video dedicated solely to a Fallout 4 Any%
run, with the last solo video for the run
being from early 2018.
I do have two videos on my channel that contain
the run that have been posted since then,
the first being my video from June of 2019
explaining an anthology run, and the second
being my AGDQ run from this past January,
but neither of those videos fully reflect
the current state or optimization of the route.
The goal of this video is to try and fully
explain the speedrun in real-time over the
gameplay as it’s happening, and to be a
fully self-contained video where you don’t
need to watch any other of my videos to understand
what’s happening.
Because of this, if you’ve seen either of
the videos I’ve already mentioned, or any
other of my Fallout 4 videos from the past
year or so, there might be some repeated information
in here that you’re already familiar with,
but there is a lot of new stuff, as well as
new ways the information will be presented that
will hopefully make it easier to understand and follow.
So with this being an Any% run, glitches are
allowed, and console commands are not.
If you would prefer to watch a glitchless
speedrun of Fallout 4, I have a video for
that run as well that’s linked in the description
if you’d prefer to watch that.
Also, if you hate my voice or think that speedruns
just shouldn’t have commentary, there’s
a link in the description to this run with
only game audio.
Also there’s a link to the run with the
original audio from my stream as well.
There’s a couple other things that you should
probably know before we get into the run,
but none of them are 100% necessary to know.
It would just be remiss of me to not include
them in the video, but there’s not much
time during the run to address them.
If you want to skip this section where I go
over some things I often get comments on like
what patch this is played on, how the timer
knows when to pause itself, and stuff like
that, then click to the time that’s shown
on screen now.
Firstly, a super common comment that people
leave on speedruns of Fallout games is that
it’s an open-ended game that you can’t
truly beat.
If you’re one of the people who believes
this, just know that this is a speedrun of
the main quest, with the run officially ending
when we reach the end cinematic.
This run is performed on version 1.1.30, which
is the first patched version of the game.
This is because there are a couple glitches
that are patched out that we use in this run,
which I’ll specifically call out when we
get to them.
Also, this is a completely vanilla version
of the game with no mods installed.
So, one of the first things you’ll notice
is that the game is in French.
This is because there are two sections of
the game with unskippable dialogue: the intro
of the run up to exiting the cryo pod, and
the memory sequence in the middle of the run.
The length of these sections vary based on
what language you play in, and for the intro
sequence also based on whether you’re playing
as Nate or Nora.
The fastest combination of language and character
is to play as Nate with French dialogue.
Also, if you’re curious, the slowest language
is Japanese.
You may be wondering how all of the text and,
when we get there, the end cinematic are still
in English, and that’s because we typically
install the game in English, and then just
replace the English dialogues file with the
French dialogues file, and leave the text
and video cinematic files untouched.
Next, this run is performed on the ‘Very
Easy’ difficulty, because we take less damage
and also are able to one-shot a few enemies
with our 10mm, but it doesn’t make a huge
difference in the run.
Also, during this run, our framerate is limited
to 60 FPS, as indicated by the frame counter
in the top right corner.
This is because the physics of the game are
tied to framerate, so if you run the game
at 300 FPS, your character will naturally
move a lot faster than someone who’s able
to only run the game at 60 FPS.
In an effort to try and make the competition
as fair as possible for speedrunning, all
runs must be limited to 60 FPS if you’re
going to be submitting to the leaderboard,
just so that people aren’t able to buy records
with a fancy PC that can run the game super fast.
You may ask if that’s fair for people who
can’t get their game to run at 60 FPS, but
the physics of the game behave relatively
the same between 25 and 60 FPS, so it really
isn’t an issue.
Speaking of hitting 60 FPS, most runners will
run the game on the lowest visual settings
to try and make sure we hit 60 FPS when we’re running through more demanding areas like downtown Boston.
Another aspect of making sure that the run
is fair for everyone is accounting for loading screens.
People who have the ability to purchase more
expensive computers would obviously have faster
loading screens as well, which would put them at an advantage against people with less powerful computers.
To account for this, the timer we use, which
is called LiveSplit, reads the memory of the
game and is able to tell when the game is
loading.
When loading is detected, the timer automatically
pauses itself, ensuring that only the time
when we’re in control of our character is
what counts towards our overall time.
This doesn’t apply to elevators though, because
elevator rides are actually a set length of time.
I wear a heart rate monitor when I stream
my speedruns just as a fun little addition
to the stream, but it’s a cool way to show
when I get nervous and stuff like that, and
near the end of the run you’ll really see
that in full effect.
Just as a frame of reference though if you’re
watching the heart rate throughout the run,
my resting heart rate when I’m streaming is usually somewhere between 60 and 75 beats per minute.
Okay, with all that covered, let’s get to
the actual run.
So when we start a new game and create our
character, we’re going to cycle through
the preset faces in a certain pattern to time
out where Codsworth will be.
Codsworth roams the house while we create
our characters, and if we talk to him as he’s
walking back towards the kitchen, we save
about half a second to a second once we start the run.
The run officially begins as soon as we gain control
of our character after confirming what we look like.
Also, the reason why I chose to play as presets
three for both Nate and Nora is that they’re
the canon faces of these characters in the
Fallout lore.
My timer starts at -3.5 seconds because that’s
about how long it takes to gain control of
our character after confirming our looks,
so the timer should hit zero as soon as we
start moving the character on our own accord.
The beginning of the run consists mainly of
just talking with Codsworth and Nora as soon
as they start talking, which skips a lot of
dialogue inside of the house, and gets us
to the apocalypse faster, which if you ask
me is a pretty cunning ploy by Nate to try
and get out of his marriage as quickly as
possible.
The second time we talk to Codsworth, which
is when he finishes doing the dishes, requires
us to wait for him to start exclaiming about
Shaun, but by standing exactly where we are
now and looking to a specific spot in the
backyard and spamming E to interact, it perfectly
times it out so we interact with Codsworth
the moment he starts talking for maximum efficiency.
After interacting with Codsworth and then
Nora we do some spinnies to pass the time,
and then we’re going to stand at the front
door and wait for the Vault-Tec Rep.
I’m about to absolutely ruin this game for
a lot of you, but when we get to the front
door and stand there staring at it, I’d
like for you to just notice how the window
in the door is off-centered.
I figured I’d give you a moment to soak
that one in.
When the Vault-Tec Rep eventually arrives
and does some nagging, we’re going to fill
out our character name and our S.P.E.C.I.A.L.
stats.
For our name, we just type the letter ‘r’
because it’s fast to type, and the ‘R’
button on the keyboard is also the button 
to confirm our stats so it involves less finger movement.
For this run, we’re going to max out both Endurance and Agility, and then dump the rest of our points into Luck.
Endurance affects how slowly your AP bar drains
as you sprint, and sprinting is fast, so we
obviously want to do that as much as possible.
Also, Endurance gives you more health, which
is always nice to have.
Agility affects how many Action Points you
have, and we want as much as possible because
we want to be sprinting as much as possible,
and we’re also going to be using V.A.T.S.
a lot through the run, and that also uses
up Action Points.
The reason why we dump the rest of our points
into Luck is that it’s the fastest stat
to dump our points into, as the final three
points we have available to assign don’t matter.
We could technically assign them to Intelligence
for bonus experience, or something like Charisma
for speech checks, but even if we had those extra points in those stats, it wouldn’t make the run any faster.
We don’t have to do any speech checks through
the run so Charisma doesn’t matter, and
our level is pretty irrelevant since we only
take one perk for pickpocketing throughout
the whole run, so Intelligence is irrelevant as well because no other perks would be beneficial
to us in the run.
You may remember that in the past we would
take ‘Action Boy’ for the bonus AP regeneration,
or ‘Solar Powered’ for the bonus Endurance,
but those are both antiquated strats.
You’ll see why we don’t take those anymore
later on in the run.
After interacting with our spouse, child,
and robot a few times, we’re going to absolutely
book it out of the house, leaving Nora and
Shaun in a dust cloud as we ask them if they’ve
never taken a shortcut before and leap some
garden fences.
We then run across a log to cross a creek, avoiding having to use a rope swing and pull a Leslie Burke.
When we run up this hill and approach the
military officer at the gate, we mash ‘E’
to talk to him, and then mash it again as
we finish saying the word list at the end
of our line, which makes us say our line again,
skipping the officer’s line and letting
us run on through to the vault.
When we finally reach the Vault 111 platform,
Nora will appear out of nowhere moments before
a bomb goes off in the distance, and we get
lowered into the vault.
When we eventually load into the vault, we’ll still be on the elevator and going down the elevator shaft.
There, we’re going to spam the ‘Escape’
button as the platform moves down.
If we press ‘Escape’ fast enough, our
character will slowly clip through the floor
and fall way below the elevator, allowing
us to walk right through the protective grating
as if we’re a T-1000, because the collision
for the grating hasn’t loaded in yet.
This is a trick called ‘Clip Into Vault
Elevator,’ or ‘CLIVE’ for short.
The timing on when we start spamming ‘Escape’
is actually a bit tricky, because if you start
too soon, you’ll fall too far of a distance and lose all
your health to fall damage, or cripple your legs.
If you start spamming too late, you won’t be able to
get through the grating before the collision loads.
When performed successfully, dropping through
the platform and walking through the grating
saves around 15 seconds.
A two minute and 40 second cutscene is about
to begin, so we’re going to jump right into
explaining a bunch of complicated stuff that’s
about to happen, namely three different glitches.
First one is the most simple.
When the cutscene ends, we’re going to skip
most of the vault with item climbing and clipping.
This is done several times throughout the
run, and is performed by simply picking up
an object, looking straight down, and walking
backwards into a wall.
In the vault, we’re going to perform a variation
of it that I refer to as ‘VLC Clipping,’
since we perform the clips with cones.
Alright, first glitch explained, now the second
glitch requires a bit of precursory knowledge.
Every area you load into in this game is called
a ‘cell’ and they’re their own little
individual maps, like Vault 111 and the wasteland,
they’re both cells.
Every cell has its own coordinate grid with
an origin point of (0,0,0) being somewhere in the grid.
The location of your character is stored in
the game’s memory as a coordinate based
on where you’re located on the coordinate
grid of the cell you’re in.
Vault 111 has an origin point, and so does
the wasteland, and every other cell.
So the next glitch, which is called a punchwarp,
allows us to store what our coordinate value
is in our current cell, and then teleport
back to those coordinates in either the cell
we’re currently in, or to those coordinates
in another cell.
So if we setup a punchwarp when we’re standing
at the coordinate (-25,120,15) in Vault 111,
and then we go into the wasteland and trigger
our punchwarp, we’ll get teleported to the
coordinates (-25,120,15) in the wasteland.
Punchwarping is done by attempting to melee
attack an enemy or object in V.A.T.S. when
V.A.T.S. thinks that you should be able to
attack it, but your orientation to the object
that you’re attacking makes pathfinding
difficult.
If what you’re targeting is in a hard-to-get-to
place, that would require your character to
either clip through objects, or go out-of-bounds,
then the game has to think for a moment about
how it’ll get your character next to the
target.
This is indicated by the game going into a
weird ‘inside your head’ third-person
camera, or a third-person camera that seems like just a slight offset of where the first-person camera should be.
If you cancel your attack while the game is
in this weird state, then the coordinates
of where you’re standing get stored, and
the next time you attempt to melee attack
something in V.A.T.S. you’ll get teleported
to those coordinates in whatever cell you’re in.
You’ll see me setup a punchwarp in a moment on a radroach, but I won’t be triggering it until we’re outside.
That’s it for punchwarping; the final glitch
that you’ll be seeing in a second is called ‘C.O.C. 2.’
‘C.O.C.’ is a term used in Creation Engine
games that stands for ‘center on cell.’
In each cell, there’s a set C.O.C. location
chosen by the developers.
This is typically near where the player would
enter the location.
Should the player fall out-of-bounds,
rather than fall for the rest of eternity,
they'll instead eventually hit an invisible barrier
that we refer to as the C.O.C. plane.
When you hit this, you get teleported back
to the C.O.C. location in your current cell.
Alternatively, in Fallout 4, if you’re directly
beneath solid ground in the cell when you
hit the C.O.C. plane, you’ll get warped straight upwards to the ground above you, rather than the C.O.C. point.
This is referred to as an ‘upwarp.’
The C.O.C. plane is finite in size, meaning
that if you jump out-of-bounds, you can go
past the edge of the plane and fall even further
past the C.O.C. plane.
Rather than fall forever, there’s an additional
plane which we believe to be the cell floor,
and when you hit it, it behaves as a C.O.C.
plane, which is why we call this ‘C.O.C. 2.’
If in Vault 111, we jump out-of-bounds around
the C.O.C. plane, and then turn around while
falling and fall beneath the elevator that
we normally ride to exit the vault, when we
hit the C.O.C. 2 plane, we’ll get warped to the top of the elevator, which is where the load zone to exit the vault is.
This skips riding the elevator up, and saves around 30-40 seconds compared to riding the elevator normally.
When we gain control, we ditch our spouse-sicle
and begin to run through the vault.
Our first stop is picking up a security baton, 
which enables V.A.T.S. for us so we can set
up a punchwarp soon.
We’re then going to perform the first item
clip of the run to skip most of the vault,
and after the first clip we’ll pick up another
cone for the second clip that’s coming up
soon because the first cone doesn’t come
through the ceiling with us.
With the second cone in hand, we now run over
to a radroach and position ourselves funny
to set up a punchwarp by targeting the radroach
and cancelling the attack immediately.
We now perform the second VLC clip to get
onto the roof of the vault, where we perform
a couple tight jumps and a pixel walk.
We follow this up with falling out-of-bounds
past the extents of the C.O.C. plane, and
then turn around to fall underneath the elevator
where we quicksave and quickload, which C.O.C.’s
us immediately, bringing us to the loading
screen for exiting the vault.
Exiting the vault this way skips grabbing
the Pip-Boy, but when you exit the vault,
the game checks to make sure you have it, and if you don’t then the game automatically gives it to you.
The only problem is that it’s invisible
until you either quit to the main menu or
enter Power Armor, but we’ll be quitting
to the main menu shortly after exiting the
vault to perform another glitch, so the Pip-Boy
being invisible doesn’t really affect us.
Outside the vault, we immediately ran
down the hill to the closest house in Sanctuary,
which contains some radroaches.
Here we’re going to trigger our punchwarp
by attacking one in V.A.T.S., which begins
to teleport us across the map to the coordinates
of where we set up the punchwarp in Vault 111.
After loading for a moment, we’ll be beneath
the map, and by holding ‘S’ to move backwards,
we’ll be positioned under the map right by
Greenetech Genetics, where we’re going to upwarp to.
This is fantastic, since Greenetech Genetics
is an important location in the story of the
game, and we have to come back here later, so by discovering it now we can just fast travel back later.
When we discovered Greenetech just now, we
made a quicksave in preparation for a glitch
called loadwarping, which I’ll explain later,
because there’s no time to right now.
Just remember the fact that immediately upon
discovering Greenetech, I made a quicksave,
and I loadwarp upon entering the sewer.
This sewer is actually a late game area with
a lot of stuff here that has to deal with
endgame quests, but that’ll be apparent
in a moment.
When we load into the sewer, we’re going
to immediately quit to the main menu, followed
by pressing continue to load the autosave
that was made when we entered the sewer.
If you load a save that was made underwater
from the main menu, you’ll load at the water’s
surface which just so happens to be out-of-bounds
inside of this sewer.
By then navigating in the water out-of-bounds
and swimming alongside a specific pipe, we
hit a trigger which gives us the quest Nuclear
Option, which if you’re unfamiliar with
the game, is the final quest in the main story.
Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that we
can just go and finish the game this second.
In order to finish the story, we have to be
able to enter the Institute, which is most
quickly done by building a teleporter, because
the other entrances aren’t available for us to use.
In order to build a teleporter, we need teleporter
plans and a decoded Courser Chip, which requires
us to go through Kellogg’s memories, which
requires more and more things.
You get the picture.
We have a long list of things to do in order
to enter the Institute, but once we enter
the Institute, we’re able to finish the
game.
The first thing we’re going to do is some
shopping to get some items to speed up the run.
After using an enamel bucket to item climb
up onto a bridge and running past a Raider
and their doge, we’re going to run to Goodneighbor,
picking up a frag mine along the way.
Frag mines are an excellent item to have in
the speedrun because you can target them in V.A.T.S.
This means that we can use them to setup punchwarps
and don’t have to rely on enemy positioning
and locations to setup punchwarps at specific
coordinates.
We enter Goodneighbor by jumping into a loadzone
that’s located in this alley, and along
the way we were sure to run along the left
side of an old semi-trailer to discover the
Old Corner Bookstore location for later.
When we load into Goodneighbor, we’re going
to immediately shop with KL-E-0 and perform
one of the glitches that was patched out in
later versions of the game.
By buying a full ammo stack and then selling
back about 7/8ths of the stack, it will lock
the remaining 1/8th in our inventory to sell
back over and over, and after doing it enough
times, when we try to buy the big ammo stack
again, it will instead sell it over and over
to KL-E-0, building up an insane amount of
store credit.
We use our newfound wealth to purchase a 10mm
with some ammo, an expensive chestpiece and
greave, all of KL-E-0’s frag mines, as well
as a few pipe pistols for performing item
clips later, and then speak with Daisy through
a wall to whom we sell the chestpiece and
greave that we just bought to get store credit,
and buy a piece of armor called the Destroyer’s
Left Leg, as well as a biometric scanner.
We then immediately stole the Fat Man and
Mini Nuke that were behind KL-E-0, made a
quicksave, and loaded the autosave from the sewer.
Here we’re going to perform another loadwarp.
So loadwarps are a way to load old saves but
maintain progress.
By making a quicksave, and then loading an
old save and entering a door or a transition
to another cell, and quickloading with precise
timing, instead of loading in on the other
side of the door as the character from the
old save you loaded, you’ll instead load
in as the character from the quicksave.
So instead of exiting the sewer as the person
who just entered the sewer in the autosave,
we’ll exit as the person who just did all
the shopping who also has several additional
locations discovered, as well as the final
quest.
When we exit the sewer, we’re going to immediately
bind our 10mm, Fat Man, security baton, frag
mines, and the Destroyer’s Left Leg.
When we exit the Pip-Boy, we’re going to
then equip our frag mines and leg piece with
our hotkeys, and the reason why I hotkeyed
the leg instead of just equipping it like
normal will become apparent in a bit.
So the Destroyer’s Left Leg has an armor
effect that increases our movespeed by 10%,
which is pretty neat, but this is a speedrun
and we have an insatiable lust for speed,
so we’re now making our way over to Bunker
Hill to do some more shopping.
After we just leaped over some water, we stand
in a precise spot, throw a frag mine up, and
make a save the moment we let go, followed
by setting up a punchwarp on the frag mine in the air.
We now have our coordinates stored to that
location, and we made the save because we’re
going to be performing the same punchwarp
over and over pretty soon, so we can just
load the save we just made again and again
to be able to set up the punchwarp multiple times.
When we arrive at Bunker Hill, we’re going
to talk with Deb and perform the second of
three glitches that are patched out.
Deb has two armor pieces we want, so by putting
an item in our inventory that we don’t want
into her inventory, and then pressing both
‘E’ to select, and ‘R’ to confirm
at the same time while hovering on the item
in her inventory that we want, the item will
move over to our inventory and we’ll be
prompted with confirming the trade even though
we don’t have the caps for it.
We do this twice, offering up our Vault 111
Jumpsuit and Wedding Ring for a Black Ops
Chestpiece and a Black Ops Right Shinguard.
After hotkeying both of the Blacks Ops pieces
just now, we fast travelled to Greenetech
Genetics, and equip them with the hotkeys
as we load in.
Giving up our jumpsuit means that we’ll
be running around with just our tighty whities
on under some leg and chest armor, but we
don’t have our wedding ring anymore so that
means it’s legal for us to openly flirt
with people like this.
So the reason why we wanted these two armor
pieces specifically is that the chestpiece
gives us one bonus Endurance, but more importantly,
the shinguard has a 10% bonus speed effect on it.
The Creation Engine stacks additively, so
that means that right now, with both the Destroyer’s
Left Leg and Black Ops Right Shinguard equipped,
we’re moving at 120% speed.
For the sake of visual representation, these
nice khakis represent wearing both of the
leg pieces, and I’m just going to refer
to both of them collectively as pants.
So while wearing the pants right now, we have
120% movement speed.
Currently, we’re on our way to Diamond City,
where we’re going to perform a VLC Clip
to enter Diamond City from the rear, skipping
having to talk with Piper and Mayor McDonough.
Inside of Diamond City, we’re going to do
two things.
Well, now that I think about it, I guess it’s
three.
The first thing is super quick, and is just
making a save outside of the chapel.
This is for loadwarping later, and right before
we do it we’re going to walk in a weird
way to the left of the door to break away
from the dialogue of Pastor Clements so when
we load the save later we aren’t in dialogue
with him.
The second thing we’ll be doing is just
running across town and entering and exiting
Nick Valentine’s Detective Agency.
Normally you rescue Nick in Park Street Station
and Vault 114, and then track down the bald
dude who gave our spouse a migraine earlier,
and then have a confrontation with the bald
dude, whose actual name is Kellogg.
Playing casually, you’re not allowed to
confront Kellogg without rescuing Nick, but
we’re going to sequence break meeting Kellogg,
and talk with him before ever meeting Nick.
Even with this sequence break, you usually
would have to still go rescue Nick, but there’s
a trigger inside of his detective agency where
if you enter the agency once, and then talk
with Kellogg, Nick will get teleported to the agency
and we won’t have to go rescue him in Vault 114.
So that’s why we enter the agency.
The final thing we do is a glitch called ‘Armor
Stacking,’ and it both speeds up the run
tremendously, and also grinds it to a halt.
It’s what’s going on right now on your
screen, and there’s a lot to it, but don’t
worry, it takes a while so we have plenty
of time to explain it.
So when we exited the agency, we threw a frag
mine and activated the punchwarp we set up
on our way to Bunker Hill.
This warped us to an area out-of-bounds in
Diamond City, where we fell into a weird, black pit.
This black pit is what we call a ‘heckzone’
and it corrupts our game.
We’re unable to do anything while in the
heckzone.
Can’t pull up any weapons, can’t pull
up our Pip-Boy, pretty much nothing.
So with our game corrupted, we made a quicksave,
and then loadwarped on the chapel door that
we made a save in front of when we entered
Diamond City.
When we loadwarped on this door, we loaded
in on the other side as the character who
just entered the heckzone, but we now have full control again because we’re no longer in the heckzone.
One of the things that also happened when
we entered the heckzone, is it unequipped
all of our items, but we maintained all of
our armor effects.
So upon completing the loadwarp, we still
have the 20% extra movespeed and the one extra
Endurance from our armor, but with none of
the armor equipped.
We can then re-equip the armor by pressing
all of the hotkeys for them, and stack those
armor effects, so we then have the 20% extra
movement speed from before, as well as an
additional 20% from the armor we just equipped,
and also two total bonus Endurance from the
stacked chestpieces.
We’re going to do this process a total of
nine times, where we load the save we made
earlier and setup the punchwarp again, then
trigger the punchwarp in Diamond City to enter
the heckzone, and then exit the heckzone and
stack our armor.
We originally had 120% movespeed and 11 Endurance,
so after performing nine stacks, we’ll have
300% movespeed and 20 Endurance.
I actually did the math to figure out the
optimal number of stacks, and for any of you
math junkies like me, here’s my work for
how I set up a formula for it that I then
plugged into an online calculator to find the minimum total time value as a variable of number of stacks.
After I equip everything after exiting the
heckzone, I then make a quicksave, load the
old save, and setup the punchwarp again.
During the loading screen while waiting for
the old punchwarp save to load, I have to
mash my V.A.T.S. button to make sure I set
up the punchwarp immediately, because there’s
a pretty narrow window after loading where
you’re able to set it up.
Because of pressing the V.A.T.S. button in
the loading screen, you’ll see whatever
item is on the loading screen get highlighted
a lot with my HUD color.
I know that this is a lot of information about
stacking just being dumped on you, but let’s
just summarize really quickly.
We’re punchwarping to an area that corrupts
our game.
This unequips our armor, but keeps the armor
effects.
We then fast travel out of the corrupted area,
and re-equip our armor to stack whatever effects
we had before with more equipped armor effects.
This is followed by quicksaving and loading
an old save to set up another punchwarp.
We then quickload, and trigger the punchwarp,
starting the process over.
So by now you probably noticed the small map
in the bottom right corner of the screen,
and you may be asking what it is.
That’s actually the official Fallout 4 Pip-Boy mobile app that was released alongside the game in 2015.
So I mentioned earlier that when we enter
the heckzone, we don’t have access to our
Pip-Boy, meaning we can’t fast travel out
of the heckzone.
However, we can still use the Pip-Boy app
to fast travel, which means that for most
stacks, we can just punchwarp into the heckzone,
and then fast travel out to then stack our armor.
We couldn’t do this for our first armor
stack though, which is why we did the loadwarp
on the door for that one.
Because we skipped grabbing the Pip-Boy in
the vault, when the game automatically gives
one to you, it has limited uses.
The two main things are that the Pip-Boy screen
is still dusty because we never brushed it
off, as you may have noticed earlier, and
that the Pip-Boy app doesn’t recognize us
as having a Pip-Boy in the game, so we can’t
use the app.
For some reason, performing the loadwarp from
the heckzone gives us back all of our Pip-Boy
capabilities, including an undusted screen
and use of the Pip-Boy app.
So that’s why we had to loadwarp for the
first stack and we can fast travel for the rest.
If you’ve seen this run in the past, you may remember that use of the Pip-Boy app wasn’t allowed.
However, when this method of stacking was
discovered, the Fallout 4 speedrunning community
held a discussion and official vote to determine
whether or not the app should be allowed.
We decided that it should be allowed due mainly
to the fact that without using the app, the
method for stacking involves a lot of difficult
loadwarps, and the run is a lot less accessible
to new runners due to the loadwarps.
It’s also a first-party app that was released
by Bethesda, and not some sort of third-party mod.
We do have a couple rules about using the
app though.
The main one is that it has to be ran using an emulator on your computer rather than on a smartphone.
This is because we don’t want to require
people to buy smartphones to be able to speedrun
the game, and using an emulator allows for
everyone to use the app.
The second thing is that any time you’re
interacting with the app, you have to display
it on screen for verification purposes and
capture your cursor as well.
This is just so that all gameplay and actions
pertaining to the run are reviewable by moderators
on speedrun.com.
There aren’t many times in the run though
where it’s beneficial to use the app.
Most of the time, it’s way faster to just
use your in-game Pip-Boy to menu and fast travel.
So you’ll only really be seeing the app
used during this segment, and one other part
of the run to quickly fast travel.
Once we finish stacking, we’re going to
pick up our frag mine we threw down at the
entrance of Diamond City earlier, and exit
the park.
When we finish loading, we’re going to make
a quicksave and a hard save for loadwarping
later, and then fast travel to Vault 111.
There, we’re going to run a bit to the north to a specific tree where we’re going to set up a punchwarp.
After we set it up, we’re going to quickload
to be back outside of Diamond City, and then
run to a specific spot and trigger the punchwarp,
but it’s not going to bring us straight
back to the tree that we set it up at.
The wasteland, while technically one big cell,
is actually made up of a bunch of smaller
cells that we refer to as chunks, and only
a few chunks are ever loaded at one time,
so the whole wasteland doesn’t have to be
loaded constantly.
For some reason, when you punchwarp across
the wasteland over super large distances,
even larger than our punchwarp to Greenetech,
you don’t warp straight from where you activate
the punchwarp to where you set it up.
Instead, you first load into several of the
chunks between you and the destination.
You don’t load them in any particular order,
like you don’t necessarily load the one
closest to where you trigger it first, and
then the one closest to the destination last.
In fact, it kinda seems like you load ones
closer to the destination first.
Anyways, for some reason, when you’re doing
all this chunk loading, our punchwarp will
actually stop short of where we set it up, and we’ll end up at one of the places where we load a chunk.
And with this punchwarp, that location is
directly over the roof of the Museum of Freedom,
which is absolutely stellar because we need
to do some stuff with the Minutemen real quick.
Also, when we were loading in all those chunks,
one of them was in Lexington and it caused
us to discover that location, so we now have
Lexington discovered.
On the roof, we quickly made a save for setting
up a punchwarp later, and then entered the
Museum of Freedom, equipping our 10mm in the
process.
As soon as we load in, we level up to take
a pickpocket perk, because pickpocketing is
the only reason why we’re here and it’s
nice to not fail it over and over.
So when we got the Nuclear Option quest earlier
in the run when we went into the sewer, it
spawned a quest item in the inventory of an NPC named Sturges, who is a part of the Minutemen faction.
Part of being able to end the game when we
enter the Institute in this speedrun, is having
this quest item in our inventory, so we’re
here to pickpocket this item off of Sturges.
This requires us to delete all the Raiders
inside with our NA aim, because the door to
the room Sturges is in only opens when you
get rid of them all, and if we don’t eliminate
them and just clip into the room, then there’s
no way to pickpocket Sturges.
We shot Sturges a few times to aggro the Minutemen,
which skips a dialogue that we would normally
have to sit through before pickpocketing Sturges.
After stealing the quest item, which is called
the ‘Institute Relay Targeting Sequence,’
we made a quicksave and loaded the save we
made when we exited Diamond City, where we
just performed a loadwarp.
This brings the character who just pickpocketed
Sturges to inside of Diamond City where we’re
free to fast travel, rather than being inside
of the Museum of Freedom and unable to fast travel.
While loading after performing the loadwarp,
I pull up the Pip-Boy app to prepare it for
fast travelling to Lexington, because we’re
going to be going there soon, and it’s slightly
faster to use the app when fast travelling
to Lexington.
It’s worth noting that whenever we loadwarp,
the loading process takes longer because the
game has to go through the loading process
twice: once for loading the quickload, and
the other for loading the character from the
quickload, into the location we’re currently at.
When we fully loaded in, we then immediately
fast travelled to the Boston Police Rationing Site,
bringing us to another loading screen.
This location is where we triggered the punchwarp
to the Museum of Freedom from, when we ran
into the back of a bus.
This marks the beginning of the longest running
segment of the speedrun, where we need to
run all the way to the southwest corner of
the map to discover two locations: the Crater
of Atom, which is where we’ll be triggering
a punchwarp from, and the Rocky Cave, which
is home to an NPC named Virgil.
When we do this running segment across the map, you won’t see my AP bar come up at all or drain at all.
Remember that when we did the stacking segment,
we were also stacking a chestpiece that gives
us bonus Endurance.
Right now we’re sitting at 20 Endurance, which means our AP bar drains incredibly slowly when we’re sprinting.
In fact, if you get a character with 21 Endurance,
you have infinite sprint because your AP bar
doesn’t drain anymore when you sprint.
Because we’re so close to this value, and
we run so fast, we can get pretty much anywhere
in the game without our AP bar fully draining.
And the reason why the AP bar isn’t popping
up on screen to show it draining super slowly,
is that your AP bar only shows up once you
get below a certain threshold, it’s somewhere
in the 80-90% range.
Because our Endurance is so high, we don’t
ever cross that threshold, so our AP bar never pops up.
Now, you may be asking why we can’t just
punchwarp across the map to the southwest
corner and we have to run there instead.
Keep in mind that to punchwarp across the
map, you need to set up a punchwarp that is
either at the coordinates of your end goal,
or is even further past your end goal if we’re
going to do something like the punchwarp we
did to the Museum of Freedom.
Well, the southwest corner of the map is so
extreme, that there’s no known cells that
have coordinates that overlap with that part
of the map.
Because all cells have an origin point that
is typically in the playable area, that means
that a cell would have to be the same size
of the wasteland in the southwest direction,
or even bigger to have coordinates that would
overlap with the Glowing Sea region of the map.
It’s a lot to ask from a cell in this game,
and none are that big, so we can’t just
set up a punchwarp somewhere else in the game and use that to skip running across this area of the map.
When we finished our run to the Rocky Cave,
we made a save for loadwarping later and then
alt-tabbed to interact with the Pip-Boy app
and quickly fast travel to Lexington.
Earlier I mentioned that we need to build
the teleporter to enter the Institute, and
to do that we need to ally with one of the
factions in the game.
We stole from the Minutemen earlier, so it
might be awkward to side with them, so we’re
instead going to side with the Railroad.
The reason we’re in Lexington now is that
this is where the quest to prove your loyalty
to the Railroad takes place.
Normally, you come here with an NPC named
Deacon, fight a bunch of robits that can feel,
and retrieve an item called Carrington’s
Prototype.
Now we don’t have this quest yet, we haven’t
even met the Railroad, but by entering the
building that Carrington’s Prototype is
in and clipping out-of-bounds to upwarp into
the room the prototype is in, and then picking
up and dropping the prototype, we’re automatically
given the Railroad loyalty quest, and the
quest is at the stage where we just need to
turn the quest in for completion.
Also, we picked up another Mini Nuke that
was right by Carrington’s Prototype.
Upon exiting the basement, we then fast travel
to the Crater of Atom, where we immediately
will make a quicksave and then load the save we made when we landed on the roof of the Museum of Freedom.
It’s on the roof of the Museum of Freedom
that we’re going to set up another punchwarp,
and then quickload to be back at the Crater
of Atom.
We’re going to trigger another punchwarp
that will behave like the one to the Museum
of Freedom earlier, where we’re going to
load across different chunks in the map, but
this time we’re going to mash to pull up
our Pip-Boy shortly after triggering the punchwarp.
If we time it correctly, then we’ll pull
up our Pip-Boy after loading into a chunk
that places us just outside of Fort Hagen, which is where the bald dude named Frosted Flakes is located.
So right here is us loading back into the
Crater of Atom and throwing down a frag mine,
which we then attack in V.A.T.S. to trigger
our punchwarp, and we then load briefly and
start mashing to pull up our Pip-Boy after
our compass pops up, and then our Pip-Boy
gets pulled up, stopping our punchwarp in
place, and we’re at Fort Hagen.
Like I said earlier, we’re not supposed
to be here without having met up with Nick
Valentine, but we’re just going to perform
some clips with pipe pistols to be able to
gain access to Fort Hagen, and then also arrive
at Frosted Flakes.
The first clip is on the roof of Fort Hagen,
so after running up some scaffolding, we enter
the building by clipping into a room with
an elevator that we’ll ride down.
Inside the elevator, we equip our Fat Man
in preparation for talking to Frosted Flakes,
because as many of you may know, we’re going
to use a Big Guns skill check when talking to him
We drop another pipe pistol and position ourselves,
ready for the doors to open so we can then
climb up the side of some lockers in the hallway
and drop to the hallway below us.
There we’ll talk with Frosted Flakes about
giving our spouse a migraine and taking away
Shaun, and it’s all resolved by just having
a quick negotiation, and him giving us all
of his belongings, including some cybernetic
enhancements.
After then grabbing a Military Grade Circuit
Board and reading a log on the terminal to
update a quest, we quicksave
and loadwarp back to Diamond City.
After completing this loadwarp, we’ll now
be the character who has Frosted Flakes’s
stuff and we’ll be inside of Diamond City,
where we’re going to then immediately fast
travel to the Old Corner Bookstore.
This is the location we discovered a while
ago when we were running to enter Goodneighbor
and ran along the left side of an old semi-trailer.
From the book store, we’re going to run
across town to the Old North Church and meet
up with the Railroad.
As I mentioned earlier, we have to ally with
one of the factions in order to build the
teleporter.
In the current route we do that with the Railroad,
but it’s only been this way since the spring
of 2017.
Before then, we would always side with the
Minutemen.
The thing is, siding with the Minutemen and
the Railroad in the speedrun play out very
similarly in terms of what we have to accomplish
in the run.
The plus side to siding with the Railroad
is that the loyalty quest is a lot quicker
to do, and we also don’t need to rescue
the Minutemen when we side with the Railroad,
so we can skip the whole Deathclaw fight and
all the stuff that goes alongside with bringing
the Minutemen to Sanctuary.
The discovery of the fact that siding with
the Railroad is faster than the Minutemen
went alongside with the discovery of punchwarping,
so it is a bit tricky to say exactly how much
faster the Railroad is than the Minutemen
without factoring in any other strats that
have nothing to do with the factions, but
as a whole the run is about 12 minutes faster
now than it was when the final records were
being set with the Minutemen route.
So on our way to meet the Railroad, we quickly
set up a punchwarp and say hello to the statue
of Paul Revere, the American father of speedrunning,
as we enter the church.
Inside the church, we immediately punchwarp
out-of-bounds and C.O.C. in the basement,
where we promptly run into some Railroad members
who just sit here 24/7 waiting for people
to arrive so they can blind them with some
floodlights.
Our relationship with the Railroad is going
to go from 0 to 100 real quick, because we
go from complete strangers, to being vouched
for by the member named Deacon because he
has a good feeling about us, to talking with
Deacon about how we completed the mission
and retrieved the prototype and should head
back to HQ, to then talking to Desdemona,
the leader of the Railroad, again and us joining
the Railroad with the codename ‘Fixer.’
Also, when you first meet the Railroad, because
there’s multiple ways for you to hear about
and find them when playing the game casually,
the dialogue changes where you say how you
heard about them.
Because of what we’ve accomplished in the
game so far, the dialogue says we found them
by following the Freedom Trail which is pretty
funny to think about with what we’ve actually
accomplished so far.
As all this dialogue winds down, we’ll officially
be a member of the Railroad, and we can eventually
build the teleporter with them to enter the
Institute.
First though, Desdemona will want to give
us a tour of the HQ and give a big speech
to introduce us to everyone.
We’re going to decline this invitation to
the welcome party and skip out on the snack
platters by immediately fast travelling to
Lexington when we enter the HQ, then fast
travelling back to the HQ, and then to the
Diamond City Market.
This fully skips Desdemona’s welcome speech
and also pushes the in-game clock to an ideal
time where, if we’ve done everything quickly
and correctly so far and continue to do so
for the rest of the run, Tinker Tom won’t
be sleeping when we need to talk to him later.
Well, let me rephrase that.
He won’t be sleeping in a bad bed when we
need to talk to him later.
There’s two beds he likes to sleep in, and
if he’s sleeping in one of them, which is
the bad bed, then we lose time, but if he’s
sleeping in the good bed, we won’t lose any time.
You’ll see what I mean later.
So the fast travel to the Diamond City Market
also puts us in perfect position to run to
Nick Valentine’s Detective Agency for the second time and finally meet the legend himself, Nick Valentine.
First things first though, when we enter and
Nick and Piper are bickering, we’re going
to immediately disrespect Nick by running
to the back and stealing a hot plate.
This is scrap for building the teleporter
later.
After making ourselves at home, we’ll then
run over and wait for the bickering to end,
after which we’ll breeze through our first
dialogue with both characters, and come to
the conclusion that we should head on over
to the Memory Den in Goodneighbor.
The last time we were in Goodneighbor, we
didn’t part on the best terms, but luckily
at least 48 hours in-game have passed, so
they’ve totally forgotten about our larceny.
So just a quick catch-up on the story so far,
we’ve learned that Frosted Flakes was hired
by a group called the Institute to kidnap
our child, and we now have a cybernetic enhancement
that was in Frosted Flakes’s brain, so we’re
going to put his brain into Nick’s head,
and then explore his memories to determine
the location of the Institute.
This is because the Institute is a super secret
location and no one actually knows where it is.
To solve this conundrum, we turn to the Memory
Den.
Now the Memory Den has always been a big roadblock
in the run, with it essentially being a five
minute auto-scroller, but a lot of progress
has actually been made recently.
It’s a lot faster now, but we still have
to go through the memories to some extent,
but I do still have a $250 bounty out for
it if someone can find a way to skip having
to enter the memories in a way that is both
applicable to the Any% run and also faster
than going through the memories how we do
now.
Inside the Memory Den we speak with Amari
and Nick, and agree to go through with putting
Frosted Flakes’s brain piece inside of Nick.
Again, this is so we can explore Frosted Flakes’s
memories and determine where the Institute
is located, and yes, that is the actual plot.
After talking, we’re then going to set up
a punchwarp in the corner and run to the entrance
of the Memory Den, setting up a save for punchwarps
later along the way.
The reason we run upstairs is because Amari
is about to enter a long dialogue sequence
with Nick, where she’s installing the brain
augmenter, and it’s pretty slow to sit through.
By exiting the Memory Den after she says a
certain line and then re-entering, it completely
skips her dialogue, saving a few seconds.
When we re-enter the building, we then trigger our punchwarp to quickly get back down to the basement.
There we’ll activate the next dialogue sequence
with Amari, and also grab a surgical tray
and bone cutter for scrap because they respectively
contain aluminum and copper, which are needed
when we build the teleporter later.
After speaking with Amari, we’ll then sit
down in the Memory Lounger and make a quicksave,
and what we’re about to do is a bit complicated.
So when we sit down, normally there’s a
30 second dialogue from Amari, but if we quicksave
and then loadwarp into the chapel door in Diamond City that we loadwarped to earlier, it skips her dialogue.
So there’s that timesave there, but there’s
still a lot more coming.
When we enter the memories, we’ll have on
us what’s called an InputEnableLayer, and
these layers are what restricts what our character
can do.
They’re what makes it so we can’t pull
up our Pip-Boy or sprint or pull out weapons.
InputEnableLayers have numbers assigned to
them, with the numbers being either 0, 1, or 2.
We learned in the past year that if you make
a quicksave either in the memory sequence,
or during the fade-to-white when entering
the memories, and then load an old save and
interact with something that gives us InputEnableLayers,
like a workbench, and then quickload, when
you load back into the memories, your InputEnableLayers
will be removed and we’ll have full control.
This is because the game can only store one
of each value that InputEnableLayers can be,
and for some reason, having InputEnableLayers
on your character from something like a workbench
while you load a save where you have InputEnableLayers
as well, makes it so that when you load the
save, the InputEnableLayers that are supposed
to be loaded as well just don’t get loaded
because you already had the layers from interacting
with the workbench.
Right now, we just set up a punchwarp and
also have a quicksave made during the fade-to-white
when entering the memories, so by interacting
with a bench and quickloading once the menu
pops-up, our InputEnableLayers in the memories
will be removed.
There was just this awkward brief moment where
we have control in Diamond City before loading
into the memories because that’s where we
made our quicksave during the fade-to-white,
but we started loading again and in a moment
we’ll be fully in control in the memories, albeit invisible.
In the memories, we can then trigger the punchwarp
we set up a few moments ago to warp ourselves
to near the end of the memories, and then
breeze to the final memory, where we still
have to wait for the cutscene to play out.
When we enter the final memory, we’re going
to enter and exit a couple times, because
the memory freezes itself up after entering
because it’s trying to figure out if it
should play or not after we skipped so much
of this area.
After we get the memory playing, we’re going
to throw a frag mine and interact with it
to pick it back up, which gets rid of our
invisibility.
The invisibility is just cosmetic, it doesn’t
help us hide or anything, and when we go to
leave the memories it gets removed anyways,
so we just get rid of it during this sequence for fun.
Having to sit through this dialogue between
Frosted Flakes and the courser is what makes
the memory sequence a bit unbearable, so again,
there’s 250 smackaroos in it for you if
you find a way to skip this with the parameters
I mentioned earlier.
So we do have access to our weapons now because
we removed the InputEnableLayers, but unlike
with other NPCs, shooting these NPCs doesn’t
skip any dialogues for some reason.
In fact, it does almost nothing.
Frosted Flakes won’t react at all if we shoot him, he won’t even lose health, and he’ll keep talking like normal.
The courser on the other hand will aggro to
us and shoot at us, but will still talk completely
normally as if we aren’t shooting him.
We can technically skip some of the coursers
lines if we down him while he’s saying a
line, but that only skips the one line, and
is a pretty minimal time save for the amount
of ammo we’d have to use to down him, as
well as the risk of losing all our health
from the courser shooting at us.
Anyways, if you’re interested in maybe looking
into things for this section of the run, or
just want to see an incredibly in-depth look
at all the work we’ve put into this segment,
I have a 30 minute video on my channel detailing
everything we’ve looked into as of this time last year.
So based on the conversation between Frosted
Tips and the courser, we learn that there
is no physical entrance to the Institute and
we have to teleport in.
If you’re familiar with the game though,
you’ll know that’s a lie and there are
two physical entrances, but we’re not able
to use either of them in the speedrun due
to how the quests are laid out.
In fact, if we were able to use either of
the physical entrances, this speedrun would
probably be under 20 minutes long.
As I just mentioned though, the quests pertaining
to those physical entrances and their related
triggers are laid out in a way that we aren’t
able to access those physical entrances without
doing a lot more work than we do in the speedrun,
so for now, just building the teleporter is
a lot faster than trying to get those entrances
to be usable.
Anyways, once Frosted Tips and the courser
are done talking, we just have to wait a moment
and the TV that we interact with to exit the
memories becomes accessible.
As we’re exiting and loading back into the
Memory Den basement, we’re going to mash
Q to pull up V.A.T.S. and target Amari so
we can quickly shoot her and skip her lines
to advance the main quest.
We then immediately quicksave so we can loadwarp,
and then load the save we made when we were
exiting the Memory Den to setup a punchwarp
real quick, and then we’ll load the save
we made in the Glowing Sea outside of Virgil’s
Lab to loadwarp to there.
We’re now beginning the stretch building
up to building the teleporter, now that we’re
no longer metagaming and our character knows
that we need to build a teleporter.
Virgil is a super mutant who used to be a
human who worked at the Institute, so he knows
all the ins and outs and agrees to help us
build the teleporter so that we can get him
a serum in the Institute that will turn him
back into a human.
Also, two years ago when I made a video explaining
the route, I made a joke about how it doesn’t
make sense that he hides in the Glowing Sea
because it’s not like the radiation will
really stop the Institute and their synths
from getting to him.
Several people took issue with this joke,
saying that it’s actually a good idea because
radiation affects robots, and the Synths would
be affected by the radiation.
I would like to counter this point with this
line from Nick saying that radiation isn’t
an issue for him, so the Institute could clearly
just send a bunch of Gen 1 and Gen 2 synths
to look for and get Virgil, just like they
do when they attack every other thing in the wasteland.
I will not back down from this point that
the radiation does nothing to protect him.
Anyways, from talking with Virgil, we learn
that to teleport into the Institute we need
a Courser Chip, which lets coursers teleport
from anywhere in the Commonwealth to the Institute.
We also learn that there’s a courser somewhere
in the Commonwealth right now, and we can
follow a radio signal to find its location,
but we’ve played this game once or twice
before, so we know that we can just go straight
to Greenetech Genetics, which we discovered
near the beginning of the run when we punchwarped
after leaving the vault.
Remember that we set up a punchwarp when we
loaded that save in the Memory Den as we were
leaving, and using that punchwarp when we
load into Greenetech will bring us right up
to the top by an elevator.
This is a pretty substantial timesave.
Before this punchwarp was discovered, we used
to spend about 30 seconds sprinting and item
climbing through the entire building just
to get to the elevator, and nowadays getting
to the elevator is pretty instant.
After we load in and perform the punchwarp,
we’re then going to set up another punchwarp
before riding the elevator up.
The second punchwarp will be activated as
soon as the elevator ride is over, and if
I could eliminate one punchwarp from existing
it would probably be that second punchwarp.
It’s solely because it eliminates a really
fun item climb with a box that we used to
do in the run that was one of my favorite
parts of the run to perform.
As we ride the elevator up, we toss out another
frag mine in preparation for the final punchwarp
of Greenetech.
Once the elevator doors open up, transitioning
us to a new cell, we trigger our punchwarp
and land on top of a room, where we then jump
in-bounds and converse with the courser.
After grabbing the Courser Chip, we then make
a quicksave, load our Memory Den save to set
up another punchwarp, and loadwarp to Diamond
City, ready to enter the final stretch of
the game, building the teleporter.
So the Courser Chip, while able to pinpoint
the location of the Institute for us to teleport
there, is encrypted, so we have to decrypt
it first.
Luckily, one of our fellow Railroad members,
Tinker Tom, is a genius and can do that for us.
While our loadwarping and fast travelling
takes forever, I’d just like to say thank
you to all of you who continue to support
the channel, and also apologize for going
so long without uploading.
I hope that in the meantime since the last
video, you’ve all been doing well and staying
healthy both physically and mentally.
The world isn’t really in a state that makes
it easy to thrive right now, but we’ll get
through this, and I’m here with you as we
try and power through it.
Try to reach out to those who are close to
you and let them know how you value and love
them, because it goes a long way and can really
make someone’s day.
But also don’t forget to take time and love
yourself, because you have value as well.
Getting back to the run, after fast travelling
to the Railroad HQ, we loot some objects for
their components because we’re going to
be building the teleporter soon, and we talk
with Desdemona, who will introduce us to Tom.
Just to note, the main components that we’re
looting these objects for is their copper,
ceramic, aluminum, and circuitry.
Once Des start’s walking around as a prelude
to introducing us to Tom, we sleep for one
hour to skip Des walking to her spot, but
afterwards we quickly shoot each of them a
few times to skip some of their lines, and
then grab an alarm clock for its components as well.
When we talk to Desdemona, we aimed at her
when we initiated the dialogue, which set
up a glitch called a dialogue slide.
This is the final glitch of the run that was
patched out in later patches, and after we
fast travel to the HQ, exit, and enter again
to skip some dialogue, we’ll trigger the
glitch by aiming down sights, which will slingshot
us back to where we were standing.
This will put us both physically close enough,
and far enough into the dialogue of Tinker
Tom decoding the Courser Chip that we can
then fast travel back to Virgil’s Lab to
skip the rest of Tom’s lines, and also get
the teleporter plans from Virgil.
This fast travel is technically faster to
do with the Pip-Boy app, but only if you do
it flawlessly, so for the sake of the human element,
we just use the in-game Pip-Boy to fast travel.
At Virgil’s Lab, we’re going to talk with
him again, and ensure him that we’ll totally
help him get his serum from the Institute,
and totally not forget about him the moment
we exit his lab after our talk, and that we’ll
for sure make sure he turns back into a human.
Totally.
Now that I think about it, the story of our
encounters with Virgil is a bit of an allegory
for the adage, “if you want something done
right, do it yourself.”
So we’ve now told Virgil about how we decoded
the Courser Chip, and he’s now handed over
some plans for a teleporter, so we can head
on back to our faction of choice, the Railroad.
When we exit the lab, we head back to the
HQ where we’ll talk with Desdemona and tell
her our crackpot plan to teleport into the
Institute.
At the end of her dialogue we’re going to
blast her twice to skip some dialogue.
If you haven’t noticed already, you can
shoot people that you’re allied with up
to about four times and they won’t get angry at us, and it also skips whatever line of dialogue they’re saying.
After pumping her with lead, we run over to
Tom and hand over the plans to him.
We mash a bit through his lines, and after
he says a certain one that indicates the quest
stage updating, we walk away and grab a hot
plate, followed by dropping our Military Grade
Circuit Board we grabbed after talking with
Frosted Tips earlier, and we then fast travel
to Sanctuary to build the base of our teleporter.
The reason why we have to drop the Military
Grade Circuit Board is that it contains a
lot of circuitry, which is a required material
for building the base of the teleporter.
If we don’t drop it, for some reason the
game chooses to scrap the circuit board over
scrapping other objects we have that contain
circuitry, even though we need the circuit
board itself for a later part of the teleporter.
After building the base and arriving back
at the HQ, we talk with Tom again, who pops
up from his sleep because he’s just so darn
excited to finish the teleporter.
Remember earlier when I said “if he’s
sleeping in the good bed, we won’t lose any time?”
*...if he’s sleeping in the good bed, we
won’t lose any time.*
Well this is what I was referring to, Tom popping up from his sleep if he’s sleeping in the correct bed.
After we received the remainder of the plans
from him, we picked back up our Military Grade
Circuit Board and fast travelled back to Sanctuary
to finish off the build.
Part of building the teleporter is building
all of the actual teleporter components, and
then powering it, which requires one small
generator and then five medium sized generators,
and then connecting it all with wiring.
Running out of components in a run is pretty
rare, but when connecting everything in this
run, I ran out of copper and had to scrap
a nearby garage diagnostic cart to get some
more to finish connecting everything.
After our masterpiece is complete, we then
talk with Desdemona to begin the teleportation process.
Normally, once you finish talking with Desdemona,
you step onto the platform and listen to Tinker
Tom give a big monologue before teleporting
to the Institute.
His monologue is super long.
Luckily we can be super rude, and fast travel
away about a second after stepping onto the
platform, and if we timed it right, then when
we load in we’ll teleport immediately, fully
skipping the long spiel from Tom.
Before this fast travel strat was found, we
would skip the long monologue by making a
quicksave and loadwarping, which does the
same exact thing as the fast travel, but the
fast travel strat is just a few seconds faster.
When we teleport into the Institute, we’re
going to immediately quicksave and then throw
down a frag mine to punchwarp to the lower
level of the Institute.
Remember, we set this punchwarp up when we
loaded the Memory Den save after our chit-chat
with the courser in Greenetech.
After making a save for loadwarping later
and setting up a punchwarp, we quickloaded
to go back to when we just loaded into the
Institute, where we run up to the nearby terminal
and load up the Institute Relay Targeting Sequence that we pickpocketed off of Sturges so long ago.
This is the big sequence break in the game,
where we’re loading an item from the Nuclear
Option quest that we got in the sewer, when we’re supposed to be exploring the Institute for the first time.
This caused Preston to teleport in, even though
we left him in the Museum of Freedom.
There’s a lot to why this is happening,
but there isn’t time to explain, so pause
now to read this if you’re interested.
Preston handed us a Fusion Pulse Charge, and
we thanked him by activating our punchwarp
on him and then entering the door to the Institute
Advanced Systems.
Here we set up a punchwarp and then enter
the reactor level, where we’re going to
trigger our punchwarp and warp to above the
reactor area, where we then downwarp by hitting
an invisible plane, which places us right in front of the reactor that we place the Fusion Pulse Charge on.
We then make a quicksave and loadwarp to Diamond
City, after which we then fast travel to the Railroad HQ.
The loadwarping and fast travelling here entails
a lot of loads, so I’d just like to take
this moment and say thank you to all of you
who continue to support the channel on Patreon.
You absolutely don’t have to chip in to the channel, but you do anyways and that means more than you know.
If you want to support the channel, Patreon
is one of the best ways you can, and by chipping
in as little as $1 a month, you get access
to videos early, updates on videos as they’re
being made, and the occasional ‘Fan-Fiction
Friday’ video.
Again, thank you so much for your support, and thank you for being patient with this video coming out.
Hopefully the next video doesn’t take so
long, but knowing me, I’ll likely bite off
more than I can chew as usual.
Back to the run, when we finish loading into the Railroad HQ, Desdemona is going to give a big speech.
Big speeches are slow though, and we can skip
it by blasting her a few times and aggroing
everyone, and then putting away our weapon
immediately so they forgive us and we get
teleported back to the Institute peacefully.
I’ve lost more record paced runs than I
care to admit because of not putting away
10mm fast enough and everyone staying mad
at me.
When we load into the Institute, we then immediately
pull up our Pip-Boy and fast travel back to
the Railroad HQ, which for some reason works
despite us being indoors and having not finished
the quest Institutionalized.
At the Railroad HQ, we set up one final punchwarp
and talk with Tom real quick to update the
quest, and after we say the “fire it up”
line, we can then make a quicksave and loadwarp
on the Advanced Systems door that we made
a save in front of earlier.
This will bring us back to the Institute because
we don’t have the fast travel point for
it, and it also updates the quest to the final
stage where we just have to go to the teleporter
room in the Institute and teleport to the
Mass Fusion Executive Suite and press a button.
After completing the loadwarp, we’ll punchwarp
out-of-bounds to C.O.C. into the teleporter
room where we then get teleported to the final
area of the game, where we’ll press a button
to finish off the game.
The run officially ends when the HUD disappears,
and I’ll let you listen to how I reacted
to this run on stream when it happened.
Oh my god, this is going to be so close.
Oh my god, please don’t crash.
Please, please, please.
Oooooh my god, oh please don’t crash.
Please!
Please!
Please! *bangs table*
Oooooh my god, ooooooooooh my god.
That’s gonna be like a 35:57 or something.
Oh my god, my biceps are twitching, dude.
Jesus.
Oh my god, it’s over!
Aaaaaaah my god!
Thank heck, this nightmare can end!
Oh my god.
If you somehow made it to the end of this
video, thank you so much for sticking around.
This run took me about two months of constant
grinding to get, and I’m pretty happy with it.
It’s far from perfect and if I put more
time into it I’m sure I could lower this
record by up to about another 30 seconds,
but for right now, I’d like to shift focus
back to making YouTube videos rather than
grinding runs myself.
If you’re interested, I made the saves from
this speedrun available for download if you
want to play around with them and see what
the wasteland is like after the run, or just
if you wanna run around at 300% speed.
Link is in the description.
That’s about all for this video though.
Let me know your thoughts on it by either
leaving a comment below, or joining my Discord
server and leaving feedback there, link is
in the description, and be sure to subscribe
if you want to see more videos of speedruns
being explained.
This was an Any% speedrun of Fallout 4, I’ve been tomatoanus, and I hope you have an above average day.
