Spoilers

 

NOTE: The following information is from cdagger's original download page at the Nexus or from the Spolier Note contained in the original version of this mod. Thank you once again for graciously permitting me to use your work!

How do I find the base?

CLUE

--> The way this mod was set up was to go hand in hand with the main quest ie: the search for dad. Obviously you can't start looking for the base or dad until you exit vault 101 for the very first time. That is where the hunt for the base also begins.

Here is your clue:

Don't "overlook" the scenery, it will "point" you in the right direction. If you find something "key" you might want to take in the "scenic" view
and put your weapon away and "zoom in" for a closer look.

 

WARNING!!!

DO NOT READ ANY OF THIS UNLESS YOU ARE STUCK,

OR DO NOT WANT TO DO THE HUNT FOR THE BASE,

OR YOU HAVE FIGURED EVERYTHING OUT AND WANT TO VERIFY YOU GOT EVERYTHING RIGHT.

THE EASIEST, QUICKEST WAY TO GET TO THE BASE - If you do not wish to follow the steps below, you can do the following: As soon as you leave the vault you can hit your ~ key to bring up the console. Type in coc daggerhead and hit enter. You will teleport to the coc (center on cell) marker in the base. Walk straight ahead and through the door. When you go through the door take a right and go into the bar (behind the training/classroom, area.) Head to the far corner on yout right side and look for the yellow switch to teleport out of the bar. As soon as you arrive back in the Wasteland your map should now have an active fast travel marker called "The Daggerhead Portal" in the center of the map to the far North. But according to cdagger using this method may, "cause the NPCs to not follow their AI packages properly". But in my testing they eventually get back on their schedules in a few game days as best as I can tell.

--> step one, find the key and the first container

-Start the hunt for the base from the entrance of vault 101. From there you should walk to the "scenic overlook sign." It should be slightly visible from the vault 101 entrance a little to your left near the edge of the cliff. Simply walk to the sign and on top of the sign you should find a key called "the key to your future." Take the key.

Then from there, if you have your weapon out, put it away, the reason being, I have found through testing that some weapons do not zoom in as far as others, for instance the combat shotgun. Put your weapon away to get the full zoom. You should be standing in front of the sign, but not so close that when you zoom you can't see the sign and its white arrow pointing. Once you zoom in, there should be a white blinking light that will appear across the road, on a rock, and the arrow should roughly line up pointing to the white blinking light. This works on my machine, but I've been wondering if someone sets their graphics to render at a lower rate if they'll be able to see the blinking light.

At any rate, once you zoom in you should see the blinking light, that's where you want to go. Turn around and run down the trail to the road below, jump the V in the guard rail and run over to the blinking light. It should render by now and you should see it without any problems.

From there you will find a container which of course needs a key (that you just acquired) to open. Open it, you will find a custom railway rifle that shoots 4 spikes at a time, 200 spikes, 100 caps for the purpose of giving to Moriarty in megaton so you can be on the way to GNR radio which is where you need to go after, and a note from someone claiming to be your friend who describes what just took place on a holo disk just moments before. The note describes that you're supposed to be looking for containers that tell you where to go next in order to find the base.

--> step two, find the second container

-Once you make your way to GNR radio, you have to go out the back door (this goes hand in hand with the main quest). As soon as you exit the back door and look down you'll see another blinking light over a container on the table below. You shouldn't miss it since it's right there. Simply jump down and open the container, you'll find more items, one of which is a custom dart pistol and another note telling you that you need to install the satellite dish for Three Dog and go to the top of the Washington Monument.

--> step three, find the third container

-Once you retrieve the satellite dish, take it to the Washington Monument. Once you get there, go inside and head to the top. Install the dish, after that, turn towards the elevator entrance and you will see a table against the far wall. You should be able to see another container that has a blinking light. Open the container, it will contain a new weapon that is a grenade launcher, more ammo, a new note, a master key to all of the safes in the base, and coordinates to the Daggerhead Portal which is the location to access the base.

--> step four, finding the base

-Once you get to the location of the portal, you'll see a large blinking electrical light on the edge of a cliff. This is in fact how you gain access to the base. You have to jump inside in order to reach it. Take a running jump and jump off of the rock on the edge and jump into the light. From there you will be transported to the main lab of the base. The way you exit the base, is to activate the transporter (the transporter, is in actuality a time machine), this will transport you back to the edge of the cliff. That's about it as far as what you need to find. Let's go over it, 2 keys, 3 containers with 3 notes, and the coordinates to the Daggerhead Portal which is where you gain access to the base.

Alternately, you can use the tmm 1 command to reveal all map markers. This will reveal the map marker, "The Daggerhead Portal" which is the access point to enter the base. This map marker is located on the farthest northern edge of the map, directly in the middle. Again, through my testing, I have found that if you start a fresh game and directly fast travel to the base before starting any of the main quests, sometimes the NPCs will not run their AI packages properly.

--> Storyline

As far as the storyline goes, I made this to be a time travel mod. Most of the information that you get is from the terminals in the base. Though it's never said outright, there are a lot of references made to twenty years earlier, and things that aren't quite matching up like the super FEV and the super mutants taking over the wasteland.

So how this plays out is, the friend who never gives his name, is actually the player twenty years later, traveling back in time to leave notes for himself to reach his base in the future to have access to weapons and supplies to make his journey easier. The end goal of the contact and altering the time line, is to get the player to install the GECK themselves, instead of letting Sarah Lyons of the BOS go in to activate the GECK.

In this timeline, the player originally let Sarah go in and she botched activating the GECK. The GECK was lost forever as well as Project Purity. To make amends, the player in a twenty year span gathered a fighting force and built a base to fight off the super mutants, however, they ultimately lost and the super mutants have trapped them in their base. The super mutants have overrun DC and possibly worse.

They came to the conclusion that the only way for the player to correct this was for the player to travel back in time, via time machine (this technology was scavenged from a crashed alien space craft), and try and alter the decision to let Sarah go in and activate the GECK by having the player do it themselves this time around, hopefully getting it right.

The whole time travel aspect of this story helps to explain many things. For instance, why there is so much information that is kept from the player. The reason being, the less the player knows, the less the timeline is altered. Why only the player can travel back and forth through the time machine, the reason for this is because the technology is based on genetic makeup. Also this helps to explain why there are so many items from the outside world inside of the base that would otherwise be out of place. For instance, the rare armors, the picture of mom and dad, and the used GECK.

__________