Is The Glow worth the trouble?

pyroD

pyroD

Still Mildly Glowing
Now the Glow has tons of loot that you can later use or sell. But is it worth the radiation poisoning? Rad-x is pretty scarce in the game and Rad away even more so. Also a few of the items you come across you will end up with anyway. So I just wanna ask your opinion on it. Is the loot really worth the risk?
 
Only for joining the BoS. I forget if there is a working suit of power armor in there or only the salvage but any other weapon should be provided by the gun runners.
 
The challenge The Glow presents is actually pretty overrated, imo. Getting in good with the drug dealer in The Hub will provide you with the scant handful of Rad-X and Radaway you need, and it's easily within the budget of a Vault Dweller who hasn't even finished the major Hub quests yet. There's a decent amount of the stuff within The Glow itself, and with some investment in Science and Repair you'll never even have to fight a single robot. I find it a far easier and cheaper way to arm up before hitting The Watershed than paying Jake's prices or dealing with the Gunrunners.
 
Gizmojunk said:
I just like the Glow, in and of itself; it's my favorite location in Fallout.
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Seconded.

And as Yamu says, it is not that hard to get in. The loot is relatively good and will serve its purpose.



However, the aspect about the Glow that is most rewarding is the Glow itself. It's an unforgettable experience for me, as far as any video game goes. The Glow is so dense and thick it's basically a character on its own, and discovering its history and how it all came to be felt, in a strange way, as a very profound experience (again, speaking in terms of videogames).
Fallout may be a landmark in post-apocalyptic games, hell, even in the whole genre, but the Glow is the landmark in Fallout.
 
I'll simply join the choir - Glow is unbeaten king of post-apo locations I've visited thorough all Fallouts. (F1, F2, FNV and FO:T namely)
 
(In a dull, robotic tone) The. Glow. Is. An. A.ma.zing. Lo.ca.tion. It. Is. A. Ma.ster.piece. In. Terms. Of. Narr.a.tive. And. Am.bi.ance. It. Is. The. Most. Mem.or.a.ble. Lo.ca.tion. In. All. Of. Fall.out.
.....
Okay, that's enough out of that gag. But seriously, the Glow IS a pretty stellar location, as far as the mood and memorable experiences go, but it's got way more to it than that. More so than the logs you can download to your Pipboy at Mariposa, The Glow's background will shed the most light on what happened in the Core Region that led it to what it has become today... in a very dark and foreboding way. If you didn't know about any of the cut content from the game, one of the holodisks in particular is pretty freaky.

But I'd say that all "advice" regarding The Glow should fall under a few categories: You haven't been there yet / You've been there before.

You haven't been to The Glow yet: Save your game before you start your journey, because the trek is long and arduous, and if you haven't recovered the Water Chip yet, every day is precious, so you'll want a save to revert back to where you didn't eat up 50 days in a single venture that maybe didn't go as well as you'd anticipated. Once you arrive (assuming you brought a particular item of great necessity that keeps popping up repeatedly throughout the game), enjoy the experience! You won't need to go far to find what you're looking for, and you won't melt simply by showing up; there's time you can explore before you become fatally irradiated, and even then you can be saved by taking breaks on your journey back.

You've already been to The Glow before: It's always worth it to go in every run. Simply put, compared to the rest of the game where resources are either scarce or claimed, there's no better place to scavenge than The Glow. If your version of the game doesn't have the Infinite Mule glitch patched, then you can walk away from it having picked it clean with only Ian at your side, and even if you have a version where that's addressed (FIXT) you can still carry out everything you left behind on later trips after you've acquired your Power Armor. The biggest threats that The Glow poses become trivial once you've been there before, even if you don't know the "tricks" to reduce them into pointless. I personally arrive on the grid directly Northwest of The Glow and pop 2 Rad-X pills, then enter the grid itself, and I explore and leave The Glow behind having absorbed ZERO radiation; it's that gimmicky. There's also only 1 floor where the robots will actually be fighting you (I don't even need to disable the inactive ones, I just enter combat and destroy them before I turn the power back on) and by the time you reach it you'll have already scavenged some good stuff that will buff up your chances, assuming your chances weren't real high to begin with. Getting eviscerated by the security shouldn't be a problem. Getting fatally irradiated shouldn't be a problem. Getting EVERYTHING out and pawned off back at The Hub shouldn't be a problem. So yes, it's worth it to visit The Glow. =)
 
Never had problems with finding enough Rad Away / Rad-X for the Glow. After all, you pretty much never need it anywhere else.
 
Well I guess I might take a trip back, having not passed the 2nd level. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't gonna be disappointed like when I went back to vault 15 to see if a water chip was actually even there(I took it from necropolis first). Although my science and repair skills aren't that high so I feel like I won't get the full experience on this play through.
 
You really should not need any more than two Rad-X for the entire game. If you wind up having to use more than that, or use Rad-Away, than you're doing it wrong. ;)

In terms of loot, I have two words for you:
Plasma. Rifle.
. Only the best item in the entire game. It becomes even more beastly once you've upgraded it. But you've got to get it before you can upgrade it, and that means taking a trip to The Glow.

But really the loot is secondary to the ambiance of the Glow itself.
 
pyroD said:
Well I guess I might take a trip back, having not passed the 2nd level. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't gonna be disappointed like when I went back to vault 15 to see if a water chip was actually even there(I took it from necropolis first). Although my science and repair skills aren't that high so I feel like I won't get the full experience on this play through.
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You can just buy skill books in the Hub to boost your Science and Repair. I usually wind up doing this well before tackling The Glow.
 
Oh God the Skill Books..... Once I learned the Infinite Carry Weight Mule trick, it was hard not to abuse it, and by that time I was a walking fortune just trying to find ways to liquidate my hoarded treasures, and the Library in The Hub was one of my favorite stops to do so. I ended up maxing other Skills I never had any intention of utilizing very much because I wasn't spending ANY points in the Skills that could be raised with Books. I'm "glad" that FO2 wasn't exploitable to this degree, but I had some fun with this in FO1. =)

Anyway...

pyroD said:
Although my science and repair skills aren't that high so I feel like I won't get the full experience on this play through.
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You just need to be able to repair a power generator in The Glow to restore primary power to get one of the elevators working. Nothing else. 50 in each will suffice (though it may take a few tries) because the Skill Checks are random. Disabling the deactivated robots on each level so they don't pose a threat once you restore the power is just a bonus if you have high Repair and Science, but like I said you can just enter combat and smack 'em around without spending a single bullet and "kill" them all before they're reactivated, so your approach doesn't need to be so finessed.
 
I'm not entirely certain, but I thought you had to fight through the robots on level 5 no matter what if you couldn't shut down security (which is really only an issue if you're tackling The Glow early or using a build distinctly ill-suited for combat, but worth bringing up.)

Of course, if I DO recall that correctly, I also seem to remember being able to circumvent the fight by opening the doors on one of the blue-coded elevators and shutting the power back down before actually stepping in for a ride, but whether that counts as an exploit is murky at best.)
 
SnapSlav said:
Oh God the Skill Books..... Once I learned the Infinite Carry Weight Mule trick, it was hard not to abuse it, and by that time I was a walking fortune just trying to find ways to liquidate my hoarded treasures, and the Library in The Hub was one of my favorite stops to do so. I ended up maxing other Skills I never had any intention of utilizing very much because I wasn't spending ANY points in the Skills that could be raised with Books. I'm "glad" that FO2 wasn't exploitable to this degree, but I had some fun with this in FO1. =)
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Yeah, I'm of two minds about the skill books; on the one hand, it's a great way to offload your money and extra gear, on the other hand, it does feels pretty cheap to max out skills just by reading. And I wish there were more uses for many of the skills in FO1.
 
Yamu said:
I'm not entirely certain, but I thought you had to fight through the robots on level 5 no matter what if you couldn't shut down security (which is really only an issue if you're tackling The Glow early or using a build distinctly ill-suited for combat, but worth bringing up.)
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That's why I said you could destroy the robots before you turn the power on. There's robots on most of the floors, but they're all deactivated because the primary power is out, so you can destroy all of them while they're deactivated except for those on the 5th floor. In doing so, you'll net a LOT of fine weapons and tons of ammunition, so unless your combat skills are terribad, the bots on the 5th floor should pose no threat.

Kilgore Trout said:
Yeah, I'm of two minds about the skill books; on the one hand, it's a great way to offload your money and extra gear, on the other hand, it does feels pretty cheap to max out skills just by reading. And I wish there were more uses for many of the skills in FO1.
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There's plenty of uses for them. It's just that the game itself is so much smaller, so you don't get to explore all of the possibilities. But I wouldn't say one should consider it "cheap" to use them Skill Books or their exact intended purpose. Don't forget that your Skills can reach as high as 200%, but the Skill Books stop improving your Skills at roughly the 85% mark, so you can hardly "max" Skills with Books alone. Their extreme scarcity in FO2 was just a conscious design decision to increase the overall difficulty of the game, not a statement of their "overabundance" in FO1. They're still absurdly expensive to purchase in FO1 to "max" several of your Skills, and it's only viable if you're utilizing another exploit, so I'd say it's that exploit in particular (the Infinite Carry Weight Mule glitch) that ought to leave one feeling "cheap", not the utility of the Skill Books as they were intended. =)
 
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SnapSlav said:
Once I learned the Infinite Carry Weight Mule trick, it was hard not to abuse it, and by that time I was a walking fortune just trying to find ways to liquidate my hoarded treasures, and the Library in The Hub was one of my favorite stops to do so.
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That glitch sounds awesome! Was it patched or can it still be done? If so how?
 
SnapSlav said:
Don't forget that your Skills can reach as high as 200%, but the Skill Books stop improving your Skills at roughly the 85% mark, so you can hardly "max" Skills with Books alone.)
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It's true that skills can go up to 200%, but with the exception of combat skills I never saw the point in raising anything above 100%; with 100 in any given skill I've found that you end up with a successful roll 100% of the time.

As for the 85% rule, it's been a while since I played FO1 but I am fairly certain you can raise a skill to 100 using Skill Books alone.

pyroD said:
SnapSlav said:
Once I learned the Infinite Carry Weight Mule trick, it was hard not to abuse it, and by that time I was a walking fortune just trying to find ways to liquidate my hoarded treasures, and the Library in The Hub was one of my favorite stops to do so.
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That glitch sounds awesome! Was it patched or can it still be done? If so how?
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IIRC, companions have no carry weight limit, so you can just have them hang on to an infinite amount of loot that can be sold for whatever your heart desires. Skill books from the Hub library are among the best items you can get.
 
Kilgore Trout said:
As for the 85% rule, it's been a while since I played FO1 but I am fairly certain you can raise a skill to 100 using Skill Books alone.
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I don't remember where the cutoff is exactly, but I KNOW you can't get them 100% with Books alone. I'm just "fairly sure" the cutoff is at about 85%.

Kilgore Trout said:
pyroD said:
SnapSlav said:
Once I learned the Infinite Carry Weight Mule trick, it was hard not to abuse it, and by that time I was a walking fortune just trying to find ways to liquidate my hoarded treasures, and the Library in The Hub was one of my favorite stops to do so.
Click to expand...
That glitch sounds awesome! Was it patched or can it still be done? If so how?
Click to expand...
IIRC, companions have no carry weight limit, so you can just have them hang on to an infinite amount of loot that can be sold for whatever your heart desires. Skill books from the Hub library are among the best items you can get.
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Actually, no. If you trade your items with your Companions, they will not be able to exceed their Carry Weight limit. BUT there's a glitch where Carry Weight is not checked if you use Steal on your Companions, so you can put an infinite amount on them as long as you use Steal instead of the trading interface. So not only is it infinitely more capable, it's ALSO quicker and more convenient! >_< This was fixed in FO2, and it depends on what version of FO1 you have whether it's patched or not. I never used FIXT or any fanmade patches for FO1, so I can't say if it's patched by any of those, but the most recent OFFICIAL patch for the game still has the glitch.
 
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