Philadelphia had been sheltering in place for about six weeks when I started my second playthrough of Fallout 4. It seemed like everyone in my life was planting orchards and selling turnips on an island full of charming animal friends, and I got nostalgic for my carefully tended tato gardens, rattletrap cabins, and grumpy villagers. The Fallout 4 aesthetic seemed well-suited to my melancholy mood, thanks to the somber instrumental score and the crushed remains of human civilization littered around the irradiated wasteland. As I started a new save, I reflected that the first characters you meet in the Commonwealth are defined by their losses: the Abernathys lost their daughter; the Minutemen, their home; the Sole Survivor, her entire way of life before the bomb. After six weeks of grief, anxiety, and total physical isolation, I too felt like I had lost something.
By any measure I was—and am—very lucky. I write marketing copy from my kitchen table, visit friends virtually, and take group fitness classes on video. I leave the house only for necessities, and since I don’t have a car, I only go as far as I can walk and only buy as much as I can carry. That includes a tiny grocery store, a butcher shop that sells tallow soap, and a gin distillery; I’ve gotten to know the grocery store owners and the woman who makes the gin. It’s practically idyllic. It wasn’t until I started to run low on kitty litter that I discovered the limits of my extremely local life.
All travelling NPCs will affected by the iHoursToRespawnCell, iDaysToRespawnVendor of game settings. In addition, all travelling NPCs will reset after a elapse of 10 days. The timing is players sleep. The mod become active after the Escape from Vault 111.
I masked up and rolled my pet stroller two blocks to the nearest drug store, intending to buy as many boxes I could push on four wheels. The drug store was a disaster zone of bare shelves and erratically deployed painter’s tape; aside from the predictable pandemic shortages, there were no more Swiffer cloths or ant traps, and there was only one box of kitty litter left. I loaded it onto my pet stroller, dismayed, and looked around for other heavy goods to justify my trip. The impulse felt familiar. In Fallout 4, bombed-out shops and cafes are among my favorite places to visit in the wasteland; if you don’t come across any magazines or bobbleheads in good condition, you can always grab broken light bulbs and paint cans to light up the junkyard library you’re building for a settlement.
- NPCs Travel conversion. ↳ Fallout New Vegas ↳ Fallout 4 ↳ Wasteland ↳ Wasteland 2 ↳ Wasteland 3 ↳ Name your game; Cosmic Debris ↳ Off Topic.
- Travel the Commonwealth with your Dogmeat; Finding the ID or Base ID of other NPCs. People refer to this by different names, but base ID and ID are roughly equivalent. You may have to load a previous save where the NPC or object was still accessible. Then do the following: Open up the Console with Tilde Click on the NPC.
The analogy didn’t quite work at the ransacked drugstore. Bleach? One per customer. Detergent? Out of stock. Three cases of seltzer? You are over-encumbered.
At home with my single box of litter and my two elderly cats, I tallied my options. There are two big retailers a mile away that would probably keep litter in stock, but that’s a long way to navigate narrow sidewalks while rolling fifty pounds of clay. The delivery services that could ferry my order from the same retailers are constantly in the news for their abysmal working conditions. I considered paying a friend with a car to brave one of the megastores on the outskirts of the city, or signing up for a pet supply delivery service. Every plausible scenario involved putting friends, neighbors, or complete strangers at risk.
That’s when I realized. Whatever this is—the darkest timeline, the glitching simulator—I am not the hero. I am a wasteland settler, following a scripted path in a narrowly circumscribed area. I am an NPC hoping that some combination of money or courage will entice an adventurer to bring me the items on my list. The kitty litter is my fetch quest.
*
By the end of June, my Sole Survivor had built a village of trailers in an abandoned drive-thru theater lot, started one romance, and gotten tangled up in all-too-familiar politics: dishonest leaders, scarce resources, fatal disagreements over who counts as a citizen. I had created a charismatic, tech-savvy character with the intent of hacking and snarking my way out of trouble, but if you play the way I do—impulsively collecting quests, companions, and junk—then your commitment to the bit gets buried under busy work. On the surface, your Sole Survivor’s choices explore the oldest philosophical conflict on earth: do you serve your own interests, or those of your community? But in the Commonwealth, you can do both. You can steal and trespass with MacCready, who loves crime, and bypass all those tempting locks when you travel with Strong. You can befriend a paladin of the Brotherhood of Steel even as literally everyone else in the wasteland is grumbling about their airship. Sure, certain outcomes may be closed off by your choices, but above all, your Sole Survivor’s defining personality trait is exceptionalism. Against all odds, she will survive. She’ll save the whole wasteland from itself, whatever that means. That’s what makes her the hero of this story, regardless of whose side she takes: not the quality of her actions but the world-breaking scale of them.
In real time, my world remained small. My city had shifted into “yellow phase” and reopened some shops and outdoor seating. Many businesses in my neighborhood ignored this and carried on with their red phase policies—order ahead, pick up at the curb. No casual shoppers went inside the big retailers: employees only, masked and distanced. Placing an order no longer seemed analogous to sending a level 2 adventurer into a raider-invested satellite station to retrieve a locket. I made a long list (yes, including kitty litter) and added a good tip in advance. I checked a box labeled “do not text me if items are out of stock.” I wanted it to be easy.
It was not easy. The shopper, who was also the driver, texted photo after photo of empty shelves. Trash bags were out of stock. Allergy meds available only in generic formula. Kitty litter was only sold in a flat of 10-pound bags for some reason. I’m sorry for the trouble, I texted the shopper. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, he texted back.
My phone pinged with the email receipt, which inexplicably included a headshot of the shopper. He was very attractive, actually. My boyfriend had broken up with me just a few weeks earlier, but in truth we had been distant since the beginning of the pandemic—separated by a river and his unwillingness to practice even the most basic level of long-distance communication. For a brief moment, I understood playersexuality. If this young man completed his fetch quest by saying even one kind word to me, I would absolutely start a relationship with him.
That’s not what heroism looks like in our timeline. But this is: he left the scavenged supplies by my front door and texted politely when he was a safe distance away.
*
There are grassy parks the size of a city block scattered throughout my neighborhood, but only one within walking distance that is large enough to lose yourself in. I talked a friend into masking up and joining me for an hour of tramping around in the woods and picking up trash. It is a half-hour walk just to get to the park entrance, and at the moment there’s no fast-travel option. We walked through a short-lived summer storm, then a simmering wet heat.
Trash is a sign of human life, I realize. No wonder the Fallout tableaus of beer bottles and bullets are so irresistible to me.
The park managers assigned us to comb over an abandoned golf course that I didn’t even know existed. Separated from the park’s busy lakes and soccer fields by a dense line of trees, the rolling green lawns of the course are gradually being overtaken by native plants: yellow lilies in the overgrown water hazards, a panicled purple shrub that might be lavender. I wished, not for the first time, that I knew how to read a landscape. The urge to pick alchemical ingredients is strong.
In these marshy meadows where the two rivers converge and seashells rise out of the earth after a rain, it was easy to forget we were still in the belly of Philadelphia. Sometimes we caught a glimpse of a riveted bridge or the corner of a blocky brick building. Trash was sparse: a cluster of bottles at the foot of a concrete bench; paper streamers fluttering from a witchy-looking bower constructed of fallen branches. Occasional golf balls, some smashed open like eggs. It’s thrilling to come across them, like unearthing signs of a distant culture. People ate here, drank here, celebrated something joyful here, and now little remains but marsh grass. Trash is a sign of human life, I realize. No wonder the Fallout tableaus of beer bottles and bullets are so irresistible to me.
When you travel through the post-apocalyptic wasteland of any Fallout release, human ephemera reminds the player that regular people were just trying to live their lives at the end of the empire. As civilization’s advanced technology brought about its own destruction, citizens were shopping for groceries, waiting for the bus, watching television. But lest you wax too rhapsodic about the lost ways of life, Fallout 4 reminds you that the society before the bomb was as rife with violence and exploitation as any raider camp. Computer files reveal nefarious experiments and vindictive bosses. You have the option of tracking down a centuries-old mob boss. And of course, the main quest is driven by the rush of competing factions to fill in the vacuum of power left by the collapsed empire. But ultimately, whether your Sole Survivor chooses to side with science, the military, or the citizenry, the player fills the vacuum with their own power.
Offgame, we don’t have that option. As the empire collapses, we’ve been divided into the factions of those who accept the burden of risk, those who try to avoid it at all costs, and those who deny there is any risk worth avoiding. There’s neither an exceptional figure who can align our interests under one banner nor a way for us to sustain our basic health and humanity without putting others in peril. Moving within our circumscribed paths among our golf balls and half-empty Frappuccino cups and scrounged-up basic hygiene supplies, we trade risk back and forth like it’s the bottlecap currency of the wasteland.
Sara Davis is a recovering academic and marketing writer who lives in Philadelphia with two elderly cats. Her PhD in American literature is from Temple University. She blogs about books, games, climate change, and other obsessions at literarysara.net.
Related
Console commands can be used to add and remove things, so it should come as no surprise that they can also be used to move NPCs. This article will show you how to use the MoveTo command to move an NPC to your character (or teleport your character to the NPC).
In order to use console commands, you need to know how to open and use the Fallout 4 console. You can open the console by pressing ~ (tilde) or ` (grave) on your keyboard. To send commands, type them into the text box and hit the ENTER key on your keyboard. See our console help page if you need more assistance with opening and using the console.
How to Teleport an NPC to Your Character
To teleport an NPC to your character that is on your screen, all you need to do is click the NPC to select it as a target (whilst the console is open) and then execute the following command:
moveto player
Fo4 Npcs Travel
If the NPC isn't in your view (meaining you can't click it), you'll need to know the reference ID of the NPC. The reference ID of an NPC is the bit of text that pops up in brackets when you select it as a target. Let's say the reference ID of the NPC you want to teleport to your character is ff0030b2 - you would prefix the moveto command with that reference ID, followed by a dot, like so:
ff0030b2.moveto player
All you'd have to do to teleport an NPC with a difference reference ID to your character is change 'ff0030b2' to your desired NPC's reference ID.
How to Teleport Your Character to an NPC
Teleporting your character to an NPC is done with the same command as above (the MoveTo command) - we just swap the arguments around. You'll first need to find out the reference ID of the NPC you want to teleport to. You can do this by clicking on the NPC with the console open - after doing so, its reference ID will appear in brackets above.
After you've got the reference ID of the NPC you want to teleport your character to, all you need to do is replace [Reference ID] with it in the following command:
Fallout 4 Ctd Fast Travel
player.moveto [Reference ID]
If the reference ID of the NPC you wanted to teleport to was ff0030b2, the console command would look like this:
Npcs Travel Fallout 4 Dlc
player.moveto ff0030b2
Npcs Travel Fallout 4 Mod
That's all there is to teleporting and moving NPCs in Fallout 4. If you want to find more commands, check out our console commands list, or our blog for more articles like this one.