Skipping the Main Quest with Public Works Maintenance - a New Playthrough Idea

[angrytoadnoises]

So this post is more of a 'heads up' for anyone who might not know of an incredibly handy and underrated mod that exists, the Public Works Maintenance Shortcut. This has criminally little attention for how much it can radically mix up a playthrough for a rerun.

So here's a rundown on how it works. At any point during the main quest up to facing Kellogg, you have the option of simply making your way to the Public Works Maintenance tunnel (the entrance into the Institute should you enter with the Minutemen) and triggering certain quest events all at once to skip the rather lengthy journey to the Institute, and to the second half of the game.

This lets you skip straight to shooting Kellogg in the face, skipping the need to rescue Valentine, or seek out Fort Hagen with Dogmeat, or meet Vigil, or build the teleporter. After you deal with Kellogg, who is now conveniently right next to the Institute entrance, you'll hear the broadcast regarding the Brotherhood's arrival in the Commonwealth from an equally conveniently placed radio.

After that, you're free to begin Institutionalized, meeting Father and opening up Fallout 4 to it's most replayable portion.

Now this is where the recommendation gets a bit more personal. If you're like me, and love firing up fresh characters but hate slogging through the first act of the game regarding Shaun, PWM is by far the best mod in terms of removing all instances of Shaun and connections to the Nate/Nora backstory. When used in combination with Start Me Up Full, you have the ability to plop in any type of character you can imagine into any part of the map, start at a slightly boosted level and go through pretty much every single quest even without ever hearing mention of Shaun or Nate/Nora's past.

Start Me Up alone does a pretty good job at making you forget you're playing Nate/Nora for the most part, but it doesn't help much when you're still forced to visit Vault 111 to start the story regardless. WIth Start Me Up alone, you have to try to haphazardly force a reason for your character to be overly invested in who murdered a specific vault dweller.

PWM allows you to mostly ignore the quests that have you seek out a wasteland detective and run all around the place building a teleporter. While this section of the game is probably the most well-crafted, it is by far the worst to replay. Sometimes you just want to skip straight to the faction stuff, or sometimes you want to play a character that is entirely removed from the existing narrative. For that, the PWM+Start Me Up allows you to play through pretty much the entire game without having to hear about your character being a 200 year former-popsicle.

The only time in the game this combination of mods falls apart is the conversation with Father himself, which is entirely unavoidable. Still, with these two mods you'll only hear mention of the vault and any connection to Father a handful of times. For those times, I recommend plugging your ears and wishing Bethesda wrote a better narrative. Institute runs with these mods aren't super recommended, though possible if you want to play as some sort of runaway synth.

This concludes my autismally long recommendation of this rather obscure mod, I wrote way too much but I'm sure this would be of interest to somebody.