So some guy got upset on another thread because the game forced him to wipe out either the BOS or the railroad, and he felt that it was a moral choice he wouldn't make. I can't find the thread which is why I'm starting a new one.

Just want to point out to him or anyone else that if you don't want to kill off your friends then you can finish the game as the minutemen without doing so.

1) Get kicked out of the institute. You can do this early on by killing father then escaping the institute. Or at the latest you can play the institute up to the battle of bunker hill, but you have to kill the Coursor and free the Synths and in the subsequent conversation with father pick choices in the conversation that results in him kicking you out.

2) Don't get too far in the BOS or railroad main quests. Don't do underground undercover or blind betrayl.

3) After you wipe out the institute you're still good with the BOS, you can also talk to people in the railroad besides Desdemona. If you talk to Desdemona though she will flip out at you for wiping out all the Synths and everyone in the railroad will attack you.

So hope that makes people who don't want to kill off a fraction other than the institute happy.

I've already progressed too far but plan to use console codes to see if I can pull off a custom ending. I want to pop off at least Father, Maxsom, and Desdemona. And then probably some of the other jerks in the BoS and Institute who keep saying awful things, but then leave everyone else alone. I don't want to pick a side and destroy the others.

Some corrections:

1.) You can play past the Battle of Bunker Hill, and you can even get back into the Institute and keep doing Institute missions until Mass Fusion, which is the point of no return (relaying to Mass Fusion forces BoS hostility). All you need to do to trigger "Banished from the Institute" followed by "Form Ranks" is shoot the Institute up. I killed everyone in the SRB, then fought my way to the surface. That was enough to get me kicked out permanently and trigger the Minutemen quests.

2.) You can play up to and including Blind Betrayal without issue. The key is not making any faction except the Institute hostile. After Blind Betrayal, Tactical Thinking starts, and that's the quest where you need to jump ship and stop doing any non-radiant BoS quests, because Tactical Thinking means permanent hostility with the Railroad. Additionally, you can complete Underground Undercover with the Railroad without problem, but you can't complete The Nuclear Option for obvious reasons.

3.) I haven't encountered this at all. In fact, after being banished from the Institute, Desdemona actively encouraged me to attack the Institute via the Minutemen. However, I also evacuated the Institute before blowing it up, so maybe that has something to do with it.

Damn I must have missed that. When did you get the option to evacuate the institute?

Yeah, if you evacuate the Institute the RR is fine with you after the Nuclear Option done with the MM. Desdamona does mention that the MM will likely turn on synths too but she's not hostile. I have no idea how it works with the BoS because after the Battle of Bunker Hill I was sick of them and assassinated Maxon so they were already hostile to me.

As to the evacuation, Preston mentions it as soon as the MM teleport in that you should give an evacuation signal to try to let as many civilians out as possible. The option was on Fathers terminal if I remember correctly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUFEeYdQnVc video may be of interest. If you play everything correctly, it's possible to get the Minutemen, the Railroad, and the BoS all friendly. It requires some finagling, but it can apparently be done without mods, and everyone actually has dialogue indicating their respect for you. The only thing is that once you're done, you can't talk to PAM at the Railroad, or it will set things off to get factions fighting each other, so you have to get Ballistic Weave before then. However, there's a point where you have to work on Railroad quests, so just focus on getting the DIA cache first, then ignore PAM after that.

You can keep getting all the radiant quest from RR (except the ones from PAM) and BoS ending with minutemen?