I've just discovered.. err.. stumbled upon a bug where you can't finish the normal game and start Broken Steel if you're at level 30, the game prevents it. With the pace that the player levels up in my high level mod, this is a huge problem if someone waits to start the MQ for a bit. Is this a known bug or limitation? More importantly though, would it be practical/possible to prevent leveling to 30 until after BS has started?
Thanks

I asked this a long time ago, as I had a simulation and did not want the player to gain exp from slaughtering the hundreds of simulated enemies. The only way to do this, is to make enemies that dont give exp to the player when killed. But you cannot just turn off experience for the player. There is not a setting or anything to do it.

I'm not sure what you mean by that Bonedog? BS doesn't really start at any particular time (well, unless you activate at a specific time I guess); if it's activated it starts up at the beginning of the playthrough (Level 1) and is active all the way through with your character. BS involves a lot more than just the changes to the MQ. Are you specifically talking about the extension to the MQ and getting into the Purifier and through the modified ending and into the Citadel?

What exactly happened and at what point and how were you prevented from moving forward?

I have some opinions on this but I guess I'd be curious to know exactly what happened before I answer with all of that.


Edit: to try to clarify my point; I need more coffee!

Broken steel assumes you have not modded the game to go past the vanilla level 20.
BS does not work well with mods that allow higher leveling.

Yes, coffee is good
At the end of the regular MQ11 - Take It Back quest.. you get to choose who goes into the purifier and input the code. Normally with any choice the end bink video plays depending on your choice and it's game over.. then you see the beginning new, load, etc.. screen to start a new game. With BS enabled, instead of going back to beginning load screen to start a new game (after the video), you wake up in the Citidel I believe..having been rescued just in the nick of time, and you get awarded an assload of XP if I remember correctly. If you're level 30 and you try to end the MQ11, you see the appropriate video ending for whoever puts the code in, but afterwards you don't go to the start screen OR wakeup in the Citidel... you go back to where your character was when the screen faded to white (before the end video)!!
If you put the code in, you'll be lying on the floor of the purifier, player controls disabled, and in 1st person view just rocking back and forth.. which is the last animation the player does before the fade-to-white is cued. If someone else enters the code, you'll be standing outside the purifier chamber wherever you were when it faded to white, with whomever was there at the time, and player controls disabled.

I resurrected Sarah and she put the code in again, got the white flash.. she died again, but no fade-to-white and no repeat ending video. I managed to enable controls and COW out to a wasteland cell.. game's perfectly fine, it's just that the ending of MQ11 didn't initiate the start of the BS extension to it. I'm thinking it's because my player didn't qualify to start the quest extension because of already being at max level.

Well, that's the whole thing.. it's all Broken Steels doing, not mine, or my mods. BS allows leveling past 20 to 30 during regular gameplay, even IF you haven't finished the original main quest yet... this is where the problem happens.
My mod only adds better weapons, armor, and toys to fight the tougher and much more numerous enemies in it. Even without my mod, one could easily wander around killing the same respawned regular enemies over and over again until you hit level 30 and run into this same problem. That's why I asked if it was a known bug.. because it is one, and it's all only due to BS.

Interesting. I can't recall hearing of this particular thing happening and I'm pretty active in the General Discussion Forums and was active in the DLC Forums as they came out. The thing is, most players don't wait to do the MQ so that they'd be only getting to that part of the MQ until Level 30. If you are interested, there is someone I can ask who might have heard of this before if it's been encountered and talked about here on the forum. I didn't see anything about it on the wiki page for BS bugs.

So, your mod. It adds cool new stuff? Is the point to give the player more XP or is that just a result of the fun new toys and encounters?

I have not heard about this bug either, but its easy to test, which I will do now. :shrug:

I'm kind of curious about it, but I'm more interested in finding a solution to this annoying new development, if possible.. I mean, no way could I have seen this coming. Like you, I scoured the WIKI and places to see beforehand if there was any issues like this and came up empty. I think you're right about most players not waiting, which is why I'm not suprised at the lack of info on it, and probably also why this has snuck up and bit me in the ass.

The faster leveling that happens in my mod is a direct side-effect of being in so many battles, killing so many enemies, and them needing more XP-gaining shots to put them down... Seriously, in some places it's just rabid, like multiplayer Unreal Tournament. Nothing I do in it rewards XP, manipulates XP, or the amount gained from kills in any way, it's all default values. One can easily go up a level or two in hardly any time at all, and that's minus all the XP the player doesn't get because the mods reward followers are so deadly vicious and take a lot of it.

Yes, it adds tons of stuff. You can still use the default weapons/equipment if you like to die though

I'm sort of thinking, since there's an actual story to my mod and a lot of the action ramps up via quests, that if I can't find a way to code in a cheat to get by this issue, maybe I should just conditionalize the major part of the frenzied action till after the first stage of the BS is completed. Really don't want to do it that way because the story isn't related to the MQ or BS, and I don't want it dependant on that being completed, but I also don't want to inadvertantly disable the BS quests if the player should want to do those too.
I can feel the grey hairs starting already.

I play a mostly vanilla game. I have all the DLC installed, including BS. I was at level 30, entered the water purifier and entered the code. I woke up in the correct place, in the brotherhood of steel infermery.
I suspect another mod you have or had installed that attempts to adjust the max level is what caused the problem. I had that problem until I removed the offending leveling mods and started a new game without it.

Oh that's just bleeping wonderful
A Million thanks for taking the time to run through that though... that changes a lot.

Not sure what could be causing the issue now though, the only mods I've ever played with are:
All 5 DLC
Naouaks female body replacer
The mod I'm working on

My mod requires the DLC's, but not Naouaks, and I've passed that point in the game with both of these before.
I did incorporate several of the Asharas hair meshes recently, but I seriously doubt it would be that.
Time to backtrack I guess...

If you have ever had a mod installed in the past with your current save game that modifies the max level, that will be the problem. It took me weeks to figure that out. I removed all the 'unlimited' level mods and had to start a new game to get it to work correctly. The GNR radio fixes also caused problems for me with advancing in BS.

Thanks. Yeah I can see that happening, but I've never had any 3rd party mods other than Naouaks bodies and the hair meshes.. none at all. Those 2 are the only things I've ever added to FO3 at any time.

Bonedog, you have my sympathies. I was stuck in the purifier with my Charon mod for five days trying to get him through the transition properly. I still hate that place a little bit.

Hehe thanks man.
Now that you mention followers, I did have http://webpages.charter.net/biscuit1/karina.jpg with me at the time all this happened. I really hope it's not an issue related to her.. she's my most advanced follower to date, one of the highest rewards in my mod, voiced by my step-daughter, and debugging her at this late stage would be a nightmare.

I've had problems with my follower in this situation - would not advance to BS. I put code in my follower's main quest to wait whenever the MQ11 variable is set that indicates that someone (player or other) is going to activate the purifier, then move the follower to home base when the endingbinks quest starts.

Well, this could work to lower the player's level back down to... something else

http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/SetLevel

I know it works as a console command.

Interesting... That would lead me to think it's the active follow or accompany package that's causing the issue. Doesn't make sense why it would though, but after reading through the entire ending sequence it looks like Bethesda does it that way also.
Thanks for that info!

Maybe..

short PPDoOnceif (PPDoOnce == 0) && (PPurityKeyPadEnterRef.PanelActivated == 4) && (GetStageDone MQ11 200 == 0)  ;set follower to something other than follow/accompany package  FollowerREF.Moveto DLC03FollowerStartWaitMarkerREF  set PPDoOnce to 1endif

I'd been thinking it might've been a botched save game, so like a bonehead I deleted the top 4 or 5 saves... now I gotta play through again just to test if this works.

Sorry I didn't say anything sooner but, in my experience, a follower who is still on his follow package at that time does not interrupt the progression into the post-PP scenes. In fact, exactly this sort of follow-behavior retention can happen in the vanilla game because Bethesda's follower move code in that spot is not robust. If you have, say, Charon + Dogmeat, only one of them will tend to get the move and the other one runs the distance. It's easier to see if you get yourself like 4 - 5 followers and run them through using Beth's code (which looks the other way if there's that many).

Two things come to mind -

If you think it may be strictly related to the player's level, I'd try stepping back to a save before PP goes down and try a setlevel on yourself to lower it to, maybe, level 17?.

Also - - I would be interested to hear this - - my Phalanx stuff makes big changes to how that move-between-scenes happens. I would be really curious to know if, in your problem game, the problem still existed for you if you used my alternate setup for it. I do the move and the scene progression differently. To try this, you would get my mod and use Phalanx-MainFollowerModule.esp and Phalanx-BrokenSteel-Integration.esp, and you must start the PP scene no later than right before you step into the Rotunda and get cornered by Colonial Autumn. This is very important because when you pass through that load door into the Rotunda, you step into my MQ11 management trigger.

Now that I remember better - I was acually getting CTD's. I had to have my follower wait earlier than that - not even follow me inside to the console. During your conversation with Sarah, the MQ11.Code variable gets set to non zero, depending on who is going to activate PP. I monitor that to trigger the wait/moveto.

Hmm... I noticed right at that spot during transition, Beth does a RemoveScriptPackage MQ11FollowerWaitENDNoIdle, and then hits them with an EVP right before moving them to the new DLC03 location. Assuming a top-down package eval, it does look like it would fall on one of the follow packages. Initially I thought it was related to player level, but if WillieSea made it through at Lvl30, combined with the lack of people [censored]ing about it, I tend to believe it might not be level-related at all... I can't find any level conditions that would prevent it at Lvl30. This is annoying... I just want to find out what's triggering that transition error. If it's not the follower then i can leave her be, and if it is all I really need to do is Player.UnEquipItem KarinaControllerModule 1 and she'll be unconscious, dead, No AI, disabled, and in a holding cell light years away... problem solved. But I can't make that call until I can pin it to some "thing", some condition that's making the transition fail. Wouldn't be so bad if following Bethesda's script trail there wasn't such a convoluted nighmare. Hat's off to you guys who've been here and gotten past this hehe. I'm going to open a beer, load up the highest level save I have left - which is level 16, and go kill some stuff for a while

When you say "wait", are you switching packages or calling the Wait function on them (pausing whatever package they're on)?
I'm curious because if you call wait on them, they're still technically running the follow package, and it IS still active.. it's just suspended.

I would look away from the add-on follower on this, they do not break the move.

If you have a buttload of mods loaded, some mods are known to break broken steel at different spots... maybe work on identifying which one and see if it can be dropped out of the load order or fixed.. ?? Be wary of anything which modifies endingbinks for example ...

I am still interested to know if my Phalanx rework of that thing would fix this particular issue for you.

Sorry, yes - switching packages. Switching to a travel package, destination -near current location, radius 0. Effectively wait. I don't really know what caused the CTD - another mod or whatever. I just know this let me bypass my problem. And I didn't pursue it further.

Well, at the moment I'm doing a fresh, mod-free replay through the MQ to rule out a botched save game. I did have a couple of issues earlier in that round so I need to be sure it wasn't that, otherwise playtesting any fixes.. yours or mine won't yield anything that can be trusted. Once I'm back to that point, and hopefully get a clean save or two beyond it, then I can load 'em up and see what's what.



Thanks!