Play retro games on weird vintage-future tech inside Fallout 4.
As you wander around the Commonwealth you may come across holotapes. These neat little collectibles contain playable games, and can be loaded up in terminals and your Pip-boy. Most of them are loving tributes or clones of classic arcade titles, so they’re a pretty fun time waster, even if they don’t seem to provide any gameplay benefits.
Your two main sources of holotapes are RobCo Fun magazines and terminals; you can sometimes eject a tape from recreational terminals, so be sure to look through all the available menu options and watch for the eject prompt.
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There are five holotapes to find, and you can get them al pretty early on. We’ve listed directions below, along with screenshots to help you find them. As with all our guides for this massive game, it’s a work in progress, so check back as we update with more locations.
Holotape: Red Menace
The first holotape you can find in Fallout 4 is in Vault 111. It’s in the recreation terminal in the kitchen area; fire it up and eject the tape to collect it. If you’ve just started playing, this room is very close to where you get the security baton and fight your first radroach. You can return later if you miss this.
Holotape: Atomic Command
In the Museum of Freedom in Concord. It’s on a desk near a terminal, in the upstairs room where you find the trapped settlers during the main quest mission When Freedom Calls.
Holotape: Zeta Invaders
In the back corner of Nick Valentine’s office in Diamond City, on a desk. Note that you can collect this issue more than once, but you won’t receive multiple copies of Zeta Invaders.
Holotape: Pip Fall
On a desk in the boss room in Fort Hagen Command Centre. You visit this room during main quest Reunions.
Holotape: Grognak & The Ruby Ruins
On a desk in the basement of the Memory Den in Good Neighbour. You travel here during the main story quest Dangerous Minds.
This year's best mod is Fallout 4's Sim Settlements. Below, our writers share their thoughts on why it made such a meaningful difference to the game. To see the rest of our 2017 GOTY Awards, head here.
Chris Livingston: Sim Settlements is sort of astounding to me. It gives Fallout 4 players an entirely new way to build settlements by, essentially, allowing NPCs to build their own. Designate zones for residential, commercial, or industrial buildings, and then sit back and watch your settlers erect their own buildings, randomly pulling from pools of assets so each building is a unique. As your settlement grows the NPCs will add on to their buildings, adding more props and features and even second stories. Each time you visit a settlement, you'll be able to see their progress, which gives your settlements a feeling of real life, and gives your settlers some agency. They aren't just standing around waiting for you to place every last door, bed, or stick of furniture.
The really great thing is, you can still use the vanilla settlement system at the same time, even inside the same settlement. Zone some areas for NPCs to develop, build some areas yourself. You can decide how hands-on you want to be. It's an amazingly thoughtful and well-made mod that could easily be incorporated into the game itself.
Joe Donnelly: Fallout 4's settlement system confused me at launch. With so many other things to get on with in The Commonwealth, who could be arsed piecing together makeshift HQs with rickety bed frames, recycled cinder blocks and filthy old toilet bowls? Not me, which is why I paid the Sim Settlements mod little mind when I first caught wind of it. Seriously, if I’m to be dropped into a brutal post apocalyptic world with a shed load of firearms and melee weapons at my disposal, I want to take the scores of weird, hostile and irradiated beasts knocking around to task—not playing interior designer. I get that rebuilding the world is a big part of survival, but I'd rather leave all that to someone else. Enter Sim Settlements.
To quote the mod's ModDB description: 'It also feels bizarre that you have to micromanage all these people, and personally plant seeds and decide where people sleep—you're their leader, not their mother! You're supplying these people with security and tons of resources, why can't they kick in and help out with building up the city?'
To this end, my otherwise useless Sanctuary Hills-dwelling comrades were suddenly crafting buildings by their own volition in some sort of nuclear war-ravaged edition of 60 Minute Makeover. The tedium was removed from base building and it was great. And the joy of returning from several hours of roving the Wasteland to find one of my settlers' projects completed, as they toiled and moiled on their next venture was second to none. I mean, who'd have guessed Preston Garvey had such a creative streak?
In doing so, Sim Settlements helps make Fallout 4's settlement system feel more connected to the rest of the game. Moreover, an adjustable needs system allows the basic needs of your settlers to change over time, meaning maintaining base happiness is more challenging and raid less predictable.
Phil Savage: It's such a great idea for a mod that the main game feels bereft without it. Fallout 4 is a game about communities, and Sim Settlements lets those communities work towards their own recovery. Jurassic world evolution indominus rex.
Read Chris's impressions of Sim Settlements here.
Priorities: mine often lie with beer. My Fallout 4 character, as you can see from the screenshot above, proves the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. Once we started finding Gwinnett holotapes containing recipes for their brews, I became determined to figure out how to use them. They’re not for cooking stations, as I found out. Instead, you need to visit Hotel Rexford in Goodneighbor and talk to Rufus to start the mission Trouble Brewin’, which will reward you with the device necessary for using the tapes.
Once you enter Hotel Rexford and strike up a dialogue with Rufus, he will tell you about an old brewing machine located in a nearby bar, Shamrock Taphouse. The compact, beer-brewing robot, named Drinking Buddy, is in the basement. You need to fetch it and bring it back to the hotel.
Sim Settlements Fallout 4 Holotape Locations
There will be Raiders stationed both outside and inside the brewery but once they are cleared, you will find the Drinking Buddy downstairs. You will need at least an Advanced level of lockpicking skill to get beyond one of the doors. You will also need an Expert hacking skill to use his terminal. If you do not have that, the password is under the red blinking light to the left of the Drinking Buddy’s station, on the upper shelf by the toolbox.
Once Drinking Buddy has fully loaded and offered you a refreshing Ice Cold Brew for your trouble, you must escort him from Taphouse Brewery to Goodneighbor and protect him from Raiders, Super Mutants, and whatever else might try to attack. (Alternately, you can keep him for yourself and use the Gwinnett Ale Brewing Subroutines to enable him to supply limitless beer.) Before you leave, don’t forget to grab the holotape for Dead Redcoat Ale under the bar, seen below. The disc is the same as the one found at Beantown Brewery.
Upon your return you will be given your cash reward and Buddy will be available in the lobby of Hotel Rexford whenever you need to crack back a cold one. Cheers!
Fallout 4 mods I like and/or use. Warning: While most of the mods I like just change some minor bits or automate parts I don't want to do (but still want to enjoy, e.g. Sim Settlements), many of these mods are ridiculously unbalanced (double perks, brutal melee, brutal guns, permanent fusion cores) and will ruin the game experience for you if you just load them all up before you've played a bunch of FO4.
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