How Do Fallout’s NPCs Get Home? 

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I married a blacksmith orc in Skyrim and his pathing or whatever must've been all fucked up bc he never went to bed. He had a bed in the corner but just made swords and ate bread. Never slept. Had to download a patch in order for my man to get some well-deserved shuteye. This is barely related to the video sorry.

Imagine you're going shopping at your local Winn Dixie, you've just accidentally run your cart into a wall, you're super embarrassed and quickly look around to make sure nobody saw and just as you look behind you, Austin's head pops back behind the end of the aisle and you hear the distant sound of pencil on paper

One of my favorite NPC quirks in Skyrim was from my scaly husband. I married Derkeethus who lives in Darkwater Pass and mines in the small mine there. After marrying he moved into my home in Whiterun and I didn't think anything of it. But one time when I was exiting a dungeon between Darkwater Pass and Whiterun I saw someone sprinting by. Ran over to see who it was and low and behold it was Derkeethus. Turns out each day in the morning he'd leave Whiterun to run all the way to Darkwater Pass so he could work the mine.

The “this is hopeless” lady really should’ve taken a leaf from the “punches giant monsters” kid. Then maybe she wouldn’t be goo.

I'm glad you actually went the extra mile to watch them walk places, but this has actually been known and implemented since Morrowind, albeit in much more simple form. However there are a few fun things the engine does that you didn't cover here. At the base core of how characters move in the embryo engine are two system, a dynamic movement mode that can freely move around the (currently loaded) area, and a navigation mesh (usually called nav mesh) for less dynamic but guided movement. Think of the nav mesh as system of invisible roads that cross the entire game map, plus all interior areas, and have been placed by the developers to help the game calculate routes for NPCs to take. That nav mesh usually follows the geography of the area, so it has specific "roads" that follow actual roads and paths. This is what NPCs usually use to move between any given points, both close and distant. They will generally only stop using that when either of two things happen: They follow another actor (usually the player character or their AI tells them to directly interact with another NPC right NOW), or they're in combat. In both those cases they switch to dynamic movement which is basically just trying to take the direct route to the target. However, all of this only happens when the NPC is actually loaded, and thus near the PC. If the NPC is unloaded, but still gets simulated to be moving somewhere, two tricks are applied to reduce the amount of calculations needed: 1: The NPC is now clamped to the nav mesh only and will follow it perfectly. If the player gets close enough to load them in, they will be somewhere on the nav mesh. 2: The nav mesh has a time information applied to it that tells the game how long it takes for a character to travel along those roads. This ensures NPCs don't teleport across the map, but are more realistically pushed along like a train on rail roads. And allows them to be encountered in the wild. The latter is what is used for all NPCs that tell you they're going to meet somewhere with you, and usually the movement across the nav mesh while unloaded is faster than actual movement across the map, for both player and NPCs. Also while an NPC is on the nav mesh while unloaded they're safe from all dangers, as enemies only spawn when the player is near, and thus they don't encounter any threats, unlike if you stick around to watch them walk to their destination. This also means in order for NPCs to die during travel you have to stick around, that's the only way they can naturally die. Though occasionally that's what kills them on accident, as they can become loaded in near raiders that only spawn because you entered the area at the same time, and suddenly they're in the middle of a raider stronghold getting massacred and you're getting a notification that your quest failed. Well done. Edit: The nav mesh is also used to move the player character during fast travel sections, and is what calculates how long the travel will take.

It's scary to think about NPC's as prisoners. They are trapped in a deadly game and their only options are to... 1) Cease living by entering a door. 2) Run endlessly until they die.

So this will be a very techinical answer to specifically the wasteland captives, I apologize in advance for the wall of text, but if you're curious here you go. The Captives are apart of a faction in the GECK (Bethesda Editor) called FFSupermutantCaptiveVar(##) which can be HF, CF, CM, AF, AM, AAF, AAM, which probably is shorthand for where they're located. Their class is "villager", alignment neutral, disposition base 35, skilled in Barter, Medicine, Melee Weapons. Base health of 20, and calculated health of 35. They change factions when they're freed, they go from WastelandCaptiveFACTION to WastelandFreedCaptiveFACTION. Their AI data is Unagressive, Brave confidence, Helps nobody. The Quest Script removes them from the WastelandFreedCaptiveFaction, but after being freed they no longer ignore crime so they will respond to friendly fire, they're added to WastelanderFaction and also to WastelandFreedCaptiveFaction again. The script also checks for the timer, if there's no timer it sets the timer to 10 seconds, I'm assuming that this is the amount of time they want the captive to leave the screen and despawn in another cell. They also have a 50% chance to yell "This is hopeless" if GetRandomPercent

I'll be the creation engine knowledge guy. The npc's have a point they're supposed to walk to. Important ones like dogmeat get there and stay, unimportant ones are "disabled", or disappear. The route they take is determined by "navmesh", which are invisible lines that determine what npc's see as valid route and terrains. Theres a bunch of them and they all intersect, but the sensible route to vault 101 probably just didnt have navmesh at some point, so dogmeat could only figure out how to get there the way he did. The captives were probably heading somewhere toward the edge of the map. The reason why it looked like one of them vanished when you went through the cell door is because waiting or transitioning between doors autocompletes the "package" that npc is using. So when you followed him into the sewer, he autocompleted his route and then disappeared forever once he got there.

You should make a video about games that have "RUN!" sequences, but don't actually punish you for not immediately leaving the area. Compare how well or how poorly they fake action or background noise.

When I was a kid playing this game for the first time, I tried to follow Dad all the way from the garage back to Rivet City instead of just letting time pass and warping there since I didn't know I could do that. He kept aggroing radscorpions from 100 meters away, diverting from his path to charge at them minding their own business in a field somewhere. The best part is, he would always say "didn't want to have to do this" while charging them with nothing but a fucking lead pipe. No gun or nothing. Crazy man

5:00 this is actually due to our uncanny ability to be both sentient beings AND being able to 'zone out' on the regular. "when you miss your exit on the highway" is both one of the most terrifying and awe inspiring feats we accidentally pull off.

With that last NPC, it's probably a good guess that her destination was to keep running so far that she got past your line of sight and despawn

I’ve never seen Dogmeat’s doggie paddle animation before. Cutest thing in the game.

The fact she kept saying “This is hopeless” tells me she knew she was eventually going to die no matter how long she ran.

Dogmeat can doggy paddle? What a treat! The developers didn't have to do that, but they did, and I love it.

The NPCs try to take paths along predefined roads. They can take shortcuts through interior cells. If an npc moves into an unloaded cell the game does not load the cell so they never encounter hostiles or objects like doors that block their path. NPCs can change cells through locked doors without the key. Movement through unloaded cells is much accelerated. NPCs can move great distances while time elapses as the player fast travels, making it difficult for the player to get ahead of them without using teleport console commands.

My favorite Creation Engine lore is that the only reason in New Vegas your companions despawn and don't run back home like Fallout 3 is because Boone would just wreak havoc and solo the entire Legion army on his way back to Novac or Lucky 38.

I love it when an NPC asks if you want to head to a new location together or just meet up there later. I ALWAYS say let's go together, not just because I want to get all the story content I can out of a game, but because I love imagining I'm inconveniencing them by not letting them fast travel like they would have otherwise.

I think the NPC was speaking directly to you when she screamed "this is hopeless", Austin. She was telling you that following her is a struggle against entropy, that her painful existence will only come to an end if you allow her to run off and cease to be.

One time I was playing Skyrim, I had married Ysolda and we were living in Whiterun. I eventually got Lakeview and told Ysolda to move there. She stepped outside, and I followed because I had to go sell some stuff, and Ysolda flew up into the air and jankally hovered in the direction of Lakeview. I can't remember the version, but I think it was on the Xbox 360, circa mid 2015.

"anyway so i started following people around IRL"

I had a great moment playing Elder Scrolls where I completely lost track of Martin Septim. After some experimentation, I discovered that if I spawned a Jauffre clone, he would start sprinting in some direction. Using these homing Jauffres, I eventually made it to the a cave I'd been through long ago. And inside with Martin were the dozen Jauffres I had released. So I was able to continue the main questline

Bro! I just did this in Skyrim with the companions radiant quest ‘rescue mission’ less than 8 hours ago. For me it was a lot easier because you just need to follow them in the hold you bring them too. What they do in Skyrim is use a random background character you normally don’t interact with and wouldn’t recognize. ‘Illdi’ from the Bard college for example. Once you rescue her she walks back to the Bards college, vanishes once you walk in the door to later pop up attending classes again. Their dialogue thanking end but it’s cool to see the person you rescued living their best life.

I learned this when looking into more about the urban legend in Skyrim about foxes leading you to treasure. For Bethesda games, part of their path finding is based on how many triangles of the navmesh they are crossing. For the fox, it's scripted to "run (X) triangles away", which means functionally it ends up running toward stuff where things are instead of the open woods because the triangles of the navmesh are smaller in areas they expect you to interact with, so it can cross more triangles quicker. My guess is the "head home" pathfinding works on an opposite function, especially in earlier games. they're probably scripted to "get from A to B in as few triangles as possible". mathematically, this makes sense, but functionally it means they will seek out out-of-the-way areas so they can cross a larger space in as few navmesh triangles as possible. I love when game design that sounds functional on paper ends up with weird behavior in practice. side note, for NPCs in Fallout 4 that you rescue and choose not to send to a settlement, if they are scripted to not despawn they go to Diamond City and just stand there forever

Did not expect for this quirky "following NPCs" video to include "very gentle" and "not weird" real life stalking of randos in a supermarket or existential cogitations regarding the functionality of the perceivable universe based on it being literally perceivable in that moment or not.

I've been playing FO3 recently and found my dad at Vault 112. I told him I would meet him at Rivet City instead of going with him. Not even a minute later, I got a notification that "Dad is unconscious" :/ I used a scoped rifle to look for him and found him getting into a fight with a Robobrain. I watched his stick straight body rise from the dead like a vampire out of a coffin and immediately start going fisticuffs with the robot again.

I remember doing this with NPCs in GTA SA as a kid. You'd just follow an NPC for like 45 minutes in real life time and they'd end up walking all the way from Los Santos to the middle of no where near Mt. Chilliad. The best was when you'd get an NPC that normally didn't walk the streets, like a soldier or firefighter, destroy their vehicle and then watch what they did now that they're unable to hop into their truck/tank and drive off again. One of those things you did with one hand while eating your dinner with the other. Good times.

Pathfinding for the easiest route to a node that leads to the nearest unloaded cell (map square yet to be loaded in) is what you're seeing when Dogmeat goes the wrong way. Once he reaches the unloaded cell his actor deloads, as do all actors, geometry and textures that would only exist in those cells when the player enters them. No enemy actors or their AI scripting are loaded in these cells so while the reference point for that actor is physically moving through the map at their movement speed they do not encounter geometry or active enemies unless the player is close enough to the cell to load them in.

I love that Austin actually goes and does the stuff I've always wondered about

Im sure some of those NPCs were walking in the wrong direction, realized it, but wouldnt change direction because someone was nearby and could see them...at least i do that. Ill walk around a city block so that people dont see me turn around like a fool that doesnt know where theyre going.

I may be wrong, but I think the reason Dogmeat goes the opposite way is because at first the AI attempts to get away from the player's field of vision so that they can "teleport" to the location instead of walk there, (since it might be faster than actually walking back there) however, once you start following Dogmeat, the player kinda forces the NPC to just walk there. as for prisoners, it is the same logic, they keep running until they are far enough to disappear. I am by no means a modder, or a creation engine expert, however this is my assumption knowing Bethesda games (and a bit of game dev)

@any_austin 14:34 The tech they developed and use is called Radiant AI. It's been in use since Oblivion. NPCs are given at least 1 role (AI package) and it tries its best to fulfil that role. They have a place they work, certain dialog which can be tailored to player's past actions, and even a home where they go after work. If that NPC is killed, then it's possible for another NPC to take on the role. I.e. if you kill the owner of the Bannered Mare in Whiterun, Ysolda will later take over the ownership. You can play around with it more in-depth with the Creation Kit. There are a bunch of default AI packages you can assign to a character and you can create your own. They can change to other AI packages depending on time of day, day of the week, and other events that you define. When you create a custom package, you can select a template (Guarding, Patrolling, etc) or use "sandbox." Set the rules such as to allow sleeping, sitting, wandering, idling, using items within a set radius, etc. Then there's a procedural tree and conditions you can define. Can define the package within certain times, in specific cells (such as inside the Bannered Mare inn), and a lot more stuff. You can also look up the NPCs you were following and see exactly how they were scripted in the Radiant system.

This mechanic generates a weird cheese strat I've abused when i was a kid. You can just follow the caravan with a couple of sadistic guards that will obliterate everything even remotely demonstrating any danger to them, loot it and immediately sell to the same caravan. This is absolutely legit and does not make any sense at the same time

I did this once with NPCs in Cyberpunk 2077. There's so many people just walking the streets of Night City that I just had to follow a couple of them to see where they were going. Often it was nowhere, but one time I followed an NPC for like 10 minutes, and they walked into a building. It was exciting

M'aiq the Liar is one of the weirdest eldar scrolls characters. He is reoccurring in every game, says weird stuff, then runs off into the distance. There might be a video there.

4:38 just got back from grocery shopping can confirm that people have weird pathfinding, especially myself

I feel so bad for the escaped lady. She never knew where she was going, always running, down on her luck at the bottom..only to get turned into goop. RIP lady. I don't know your name but you don't have to run anymore.

11:00 "fuckin f*st" was way funnier to me than it should've been

The first time I found out about this it was because I had gotten on the NCR’s bad side in New Vegas. While wandering the strip an MP approached me to yell at me right before I decided to fast travel away, after spending a few days about in the wasteland I saw the same dude randomly running towards me before I decided to tp to back to the strip. He got close enough to initiate dialogue this time and I was forced to kill him, but I’ll always remember the loyal NCR soldier who spend his final days tracking down courier six.

I hated the kids in fallout 3, I thought little lamp light was the worst location in the series, but watching that kid box that myrelurk king has changed my opinion completely. Mission passed. Respect +

I wonder if DogMeat taking a round about way to get to valut 101, was because he was, at least at first, was trying to get away from you, so that he could get far enough away to 'despawn' maybe its a way to avoid dogmeat and other companions from dying randomly on that route, yk, to get far enough away so that they can just teleport without it being obvious to the player

This guy asks the questions I never knew I wanted the answers too. Love your stuff!

one thing I love about FNV is that all of the NPCs you can rescue, whether from the legion or some vault or whatever else, have somewhere to go to after you rescue them, and you can find them there. A lot of the time their pathing breaks and they'll just stand around in the same spot at that point, but it's still nice that it's there.

I dont play most of the games you talk about, but this channel has become one of my all time favorites, thank you for this.

Somebody could write an entire short story set in the Fallout universe about a slave who was freed, only to be doomed to run across the Wasteland for days without sleep in search of shelter, surviving wildlife and multiple ambushes, only to just be shot down by a random dude with a plasma rifle. It would really fit the Fallout universe whatever way they try to portray it, be it sentimental with a message of hopelessness in the post-apocalypse, or with dark humour of just how ridiculous her whole situation was.

A couple funny ones from New Vegas: Vulpes Inculta from Nipton: walks east towards Cottonwood Cove. Unfortunately he does so in a straight line, up several cliffs and through Camp Searchlight, which is held by the NCR and filled with ghouls, which will kill him, though it's a close match. Oliver Swanick (the lottery winner): walks south into a lake infested with giant scorpions. He stops and cowers until they kill him. If the player removes the scorpions, he continues into crescent canyon, which is full of giant geckos, who kill him. If they are also removed he will stand around not doing anything. Malcom Holmes (the star bottlecap guy): spawns at Mojave Outpost once you pick up a sapsarilla star bottlecap, navigates to the player in a straight line wherever that takes him, which may take a while as you fast-travel around him. After talking to you he walks back in a straight line again, enters the bar at Mojave Outpost, but never appears inside. Benny fleeing the Tops casino: He only does this in a few very specific conversation paths. A normally unopenable elevator on the ground floor becomes unlocked until he enters it, so if you're fast you can go inside before him. There is an entire extra section of basement, where Benny apparently blasted his way into a sealed section of nearby Vault 21. However, there is no working exit, and overall a very barebones area with only one explosives crate to loot. One that I don't know, but always wondered about is where the Brotherhood patrols that sometimes exit the bunker ~2am go. They only ever leave, never return. They are also hostile, but you can slip by to start the brotherhood questline as early as you want. I think they only appear if you have the interiour of the bunker loaded, so you need to wait in front of the locked door. (I know most of these thanks to Many a True Nerd, who did something similar a few years ago.)

i think the moment that really got me into NPC watching sometimes in games (especially bethesda games) was skyrim. i had just gotten my xbox 360 from the trash and asked my mom if we could go to vintage stock to get some games for it, i got fallout 3 & new vegas, a couple call of duty games, and skyrim. i watched so many things about skyrim that made it seem like a sandbox so i wanted to start with it. get in, turn the difficulty to legendary, get curb stomped in the tutorial a bit. then i'm out in the world, followed the main quest a bit, wandered around the outside of whiterun. found a giant's camp, accidentally made them angry and ran to whiterun out of desperation that i could just go through the gate and be done with it. the guards were angry with the giants, eventually killed the giants. most of them went back to patrol or whatever, but this specific duo decided to run off. so i followed them, they went to kill the mamoths that didn't get angry and follow me to whiterun, then some wolfs, and at that point. they were just running around killing everything except deer and rabbits, eventually my two heros found a forsworn camp, and got massacared

i mean this in the best way possible, your videos are AMAZING for falling asleep. theyre not boring, just your calm tone and relaxing bgm chill out my brain so much. esp rewatching past videos, i know i dont have to worry about screaming or anything crazy loud

I for sure did not expect the Fallout 3 child to fight the creature. Good for him

My favourite one from Fallout 3 is when you rig the election in the Republic of Dave and then Dave leaves. If you follow him he goes to Old Olney (great choice) and declares his new alleyway, the New Republic of Dave.

6:45 imagine that story. A small child living in a wasteland, finally given freedom from his warlord captors, racing across the desert as he speeds towards a Neverland bastion of hope, little lamp light. The night drags on, and he eventually is stalked by a horrific mirelurk king. To the average wastelander, that is lethal encounter, and to a young boy I can only imagine it to be the worst nightmare of his life. He runs and runs and runs, and tries to hide, but it doesn't matter, the beast is upon him... So what does he do? He stands up, and with courage and fights back, startling the otherwise fearless beast. Through the confusion and haze of conquest, the boy manages to strike the creature just enough to sprint off and evade capture once again. What an absolutely riveting tale, and I really think I'm going to write a short story about that. How interesting a moment to capture, how humorous. The jester claps sir, the jester claps.

I had Piper's sister in fallout 4 go on an epic journey around the Commonwealth one day. I followed her out of curiosity from diamond city. When I realised she was out in the courtyard outside, she wandered off in the general direction of vault 88, across to college square and past the route you take with Danse in his first mission, finally coming back through the fens to diamond city. I'm not sure if this was a glitch or a mod causing her to do this, but it was sparked by Piper's conversation about the printing press when you both enter for the first time.

Austin, your channel and your videos are truly exactly EVERYTHING I've ever hoped for a creator to do, and I adore that you remain 100% genuine to yourself. Keep making the beautiful content we all need and answering all the questions the world TRULY needs!

they walk in Skyrim. I remember trying to hurry and catch the Redguards that were looking for the fugitive girl in Whiterun

I've always assumed that if you send a companion to a location like vault 101, and then get away from them that they kind of fast travel to the location; which is why I always do that to save them being killed by an enemy if you stay around them. I think this because, like you say, if you stay around your companion you have to play bodyguard so they don't get killed, but if they travel alone they never die so I think they must be bypassing the enemies entirely.

NPC following in Fallout 3 is a really fascinating pastime. One of my favorite ones was following Mister Crowley from Underworld all the way up to the fort after turning in the quest.

Wow. Hundreds of hours in Fallout 3 and I have NEVER seen that Dogmeat swimming animation

I find it really interesting how games path characters. They clearly define paths that stretch across the map, I assume it saves processing power so they don't actually have to make pathing decisions, but they basically can see a giant network of crisscrossing highways that they're meant to follow and when you release them, it's like a Friday afternoon commute. It would be really interesting if you could get 10 or so NPCs and send them back home from one out of the way corner of the map, i bet they'd just form a caravan that slowly sees people take their exits. Would be hilarious to watch

I know in skyrim if you follow foxes they will lead you to important locations. The pathing is based on triangles, and important locations have more than random wilderness, so the foxes gravitate towards the places with many triangles. it could just be that they move randomly and don't avoid locations though, so eventually you will run into a location.

Back when I was making videos I spent about three weeks making one about this very subject but using fallout 4. I followed the same person over and over from one place to their dismissed place and found they will also change the way they go and the fights they have don’t always go the same way. Was fun to see this happened. Nice to see you testing this out too.

Companions follow a marked route home. Think of airplane routes in the sky. A net of lines with waypoints in-between. So they wherever they are move to the closest "beacon" on that line and then travel to the next one. Through combat the beacon is lost. They move to fight. And then take the first beacon nearby and follow the route. Its important to know that the beacon they follow is one that goes away from the PC, so by following Dogmeat you push him to the next beacon away from you. Until you get to the end of a line and he cuts left or right. Then because you are away from the vault and the beacon is between him and the vault it turns into a "direct" route When you dont follow them they walk towards the first beacon and usually get far enough away to just despawn.

I once followed an NPC for the Dark Brotherhood quest line from Solitude (I think) to Dragon Bridge, and that dude was in water, going the opposite directions, getting stuck on trees, I was following him for like an hour. It was wild. Eventually I just teleported to Drago Bridge so he could just get some rest.

I have played fallout 3 for countless hundreds of hours since 2008 and this is the first time I've ever seen that animation of Dogmeat swimming

This is the same reason I love Stalker GAMMA. You can receive a quest from an NPC in one zone, go do all the stuff, and then find that the same NPC has now moved with their squad to an entirely different zone, because the A-life system simulates all NPCs and mobs even when the player isn't nearby. You can walk past a group of people one day, just to find them all murdered by a mysterious beast the next. Not a quest or scripted, but just an organic event that came out of the simulation. It's such a cool feeling to be a part of a world that simulates things even when you aren't there.

Here's something i've been wondering about. In tears of the kindgdom, you know those fights some npcs have with moblins when you reach them? I wonder if they all lose or all win. You as the player always step in to help them, but are some npcs better warriors than others?

I think you managed to find Forrest Gump in Fallout 3. She just started running and never stopped

Similarly: in Fallout 4 after you defeat Kellog and trigger the Prydwen to spawn into the map, you can actually follow it all the way to the airport, where it then awkwardly rotates into position and fuses with a duplicate of itself.

I always liked your videos, but watching this video I couldn't help noticing how well everything is put together. The delivery, the pace, all these little jokes and philosophical ruminations, the editing, the dead pan humor, there is not a single dull moment during the 15 minute video. This isn't just a video of a guy following NPC's for fun, this is high quality content that gives many professional content creators a run for their money. Keep them coming Austin!

First time I saved dad from the simulation vault I followed him all the way to rivet city because roleplay and I wanted to protect him (had already lost dogmeat and didn't know about essential npcs), and it was a fun journey. Unless I'm misremembering, honestly I probably got distracted along the way and lost him.

I have a fun Skyrim story related to this: We played through Skyrim with Co-Op mod (=Skyrim but with way more bugs and glitches, it's super fun) and because we couldn't decide which side to take (I was pro Imperial, friend was pro Stormcloaks), we did that lame "council and peace treaty at the Greybeards" option to progress through the storyline. Problem was: Delphine (that badass Blades breton girl) wouldn't show up at High Hrothgar and so the quest couldn't progress. Now there are several console options to power through such a situation (console command hacking is like half of the fun of Skyrim Co-Op) and me and my friend tried some stuff and also contemplated what to do and goofed around alot at the monastery like we always do (deep triple digits playtime for our Co-Op run). Anyway: After what felt like ages Delphine actually showed up! But, as we learned later, she didn't teleport, she ACTUALLY RAN ALL THE WAY from Whiterun Hold up the Seven Thousand Steps because of some weird scripting bug and that's what took her so damn long. I think the most amazing part is that this somehow worked and she successfully arrived. Countless more fun storys from that Co-Op playthrough so if you're interested, AMA.

I'm so glad you made this video! My wife and I have had an inside joke about Liam Neeson punching his way through every problem, because I followed the father character in Fallout 3 through the wasteland as he bare-knuckled every enemy along the way. That same week we happened to watch The Grey or whatever that Liam Neeson movie is that crescendos with dude punching wolves with shattered glass between his knuckles 😂

You always come up with some of the most unexpected, and yet incredibly intriguing video concepts. A+

When I played FO3, there's a part of the story where you've found your dad and he has to run to the next location. I decided to go sleep repeatedly until I saw him reach that location on the map, before fast travelling there. You could see him on the map, slowly slowly making his way across.

this channel is a hidden gem

The universe does need observation to continue existing. However the definition of observation is what's in question. Human observation can't be the only thing keeping the universe together. So I believe that every atom every piece of matter has consciousness and watches itself in order for everything to exist continuously

"Really Fucking *ast" killed me for like 0 reason

4:50- I....suddenly feel so normal 😂. I do this _all the time_ and I always wonder if the staff is watching me walk back and forth thinking, "who the **** is this moron who keeps forgetting to turn into the bread aisle because they're thinking of that one Any Austin video about where rivers start in Skyrim." They probably aren't, probably too busy walking nonsensical paths themselves.

7:57 I think you do There's this concept in quantum mechanics called wave-particle duality that simply means that elementary particles like photons can act either as particles or as waves depending on if you're watching them or not. Look up a video on the double-slit experiment - if you are shooting photons (casting light) through two closely positioned slits in a metal sheet and use a device to perform the measurements on said particles, they will act as expected and form a two-slit pattern like good particles should. But if you don't use any particle-sensitive measurements whatsoever, the light will form a weird wave-like pattern. It's almost like the particles are aware of you observing them and are willing to function properly only when you take the effort to measure them. Some say it's just a hardware-efficient optimization of the simulation we live in 🤷

that kid fighting the mirelurk king might be one of the greatest things i've ever seen in fallout 3.

Loving the new format. Really feels like you’re in the action following dogmeat through the wasteland or fording skyrims rivers

Been playing TTW lately which makes companions in FO3 do the NV thing where they just teleport back to their home instantly, kinda forgot that they did this

Never knew dogmeat had a swimming animation, that's so cool

The one time I did a legion playthrough for completion's sake, and when the raiders at nipton walked off I followed them. They just walked into the hills to the side of town, started panicking and running in circles, and then died fighting the raiders down the road

I don't know where else to tell you this, but your music rocks so severely my man.

One time I meant To drive home. And I drove to my old college campus from ten years ago. We glitch

one time in fallout 4 I found the vault tec representative in goodneighbor then told him to go to sanctuary but as I was walking around boston one day I found him lying dead near a gunner ecampment

I remember doing this with a farmer in Skyrim. He had some dialogue about going to take his cow to the giants and I was like, "This'll be a show either way." and followed him the entire way there. To his credit, he marched straight to his death. Trolls saw him and the cow and apparently something was off and the giants crushed both of them.

We never talk about the hairclips. Everyone silently accepts the hairclips as law.

We've all wondered, but only one man is brave enough to look

I've done things like this before and I've found two scenarios usually play out; either they hoof it to a nearby entrance that forces a loading screen and despawns them from the game, or they run around the map with no set target destination. The latter scenario is trying to do the same thing as the former, but instead is trying to put enough distance between you and the NPC so that they leave the loaded area you're in and despawn that way. My guess as to why this happens is that it depends on what is loaded around you when they get released. If the loaded area around you has an entrance that leads to a loading screen, they'll run for that to despawn. If one doesn't exist for them to run to, they'll simply just run out of the currently loaded area to despawn. If you follow them, they'll just keep on running around the map. Also, FO3 is using the Gamebryo engine. Creation Engine is a fork of the Gamebryo engine and was first used for Skyrim, then Fallout 4 and then Fallout 76 being the last title to use it before Creation Engine 2 was released and used for Starfield and the upcoming Elders Scrolls 6.

I like the idea that her being goo-ified is simply accepted as the definitive and final outcome, as if saving and loading wasn't possible. It's certainly more convenient that the pursuit actually _ended_ . (Would an NPC like that even "survive" a save-load?)

another straight up banger!! the effort and detail you put into these, combined with your sense of humour, make these videos sooo engaging (and i've never even played fallout!). also congrats on the sponsorship!!

Austin I suggest you follow the Forsworn home after freeing them from the prisons at Markarth. It's really fun trekking with them and fighting off dragons and other enemies. The base they go to is also very interesting and really cool payoff :)

This is why Im subscribed. You make videos on things I wonder so often, but dont take the time to figure out.

Crazy to see your editing get so good

The Excellent Man from Minneapolis

reminds me of the original Marvel's Spider-Man videos where you'd follow cars in NYC traffic and see their routes. Good times.

I wander around and definitely notice that I do. Like, if I'm at a store to buy socks, I might walk down the pillow aisle, not because I need a pillow, but because one of them is a bright color and now I want to look at how much pillows cost these days. I often walk around an entire store before buying anything.

In the beginning of Fallout: New Vegas when you help Sunny fight geckos by the water pumps there is a blonde NPC who is being attacked. If you save her she thanks you and walks back to town and I enjoyed seeing her every time I went back as a little reminder of my good deed. I forget who she lives with but she does have a bed and tends garden like the other locals and will occasionally be in the saloon.