The best route is Jean Sky Diving -> discover Hidden Valley. Fast travel to Hidden Valley, turn right, run through the gap in the fence towards Black Mountain. Ignore the 2 scorpions and the centaurs, they are idiots and won’t successfully connect an attack. At the centaur camp, hog the left wall which leads to a ledge you can use to jump the Black Mountain fence.
Hug the right side once you jumped and continue upwards the mountain until you discover the location. Immediately fast travel to Black Mountain. turn around and walk straight North. You will hit REPCONN HQ and you can choose to go to the 188 for Veronica or take the Eastern road North to Vegas (along the Grub n Gulp).
Love that this was always an option. Never managed to survive this strategy without mods or console commands though.
I did it on my first playthrough (which I understand was really weird). I started Lonesome Road at level 2, and then spent pretty much all the ammo I got taking out the Deathclaws (and even then it took multiple attempts).
I apparently did the DLC in reverse order (starting with Lonesome Road, then Blue Mountain Blues, and then the Sierra Madre), and never met a Ghoul until after finishing the game and backtracking with an older save.
I just ran. Nothing more to it. Didn’t stop until I was close to The Strip. Made the game a lot funnier to me to get encounters that you’d typically get earlier on very late.
I tried this route three times before I just used the recommended route.
I love the retro games that do things like this.
Fleeing from cazadores while shooting 40mm grenades behind you is pretty hairy.
Want a rush? Sprint past quarry junction towards Vegas and get any deathclaws chasing you stuck in the rocks with their janky pathfinidng.
You need a mod to sprint. I know that everyone who plays Bethesda games mods them, just saying.
I was being colloquial with “sprint”. You can get past quarry junction on vanilla by relying on areas where small rocks disrupt deathclaw path finding and get them confused.
Also explosives. Hurting their legs is very easy with any mine or grenade and that makes them unable to run. Outrunning them or feeding them bullets becomes trivial.
Cassadores are the only deadly enemies because they have no legs to hurt, grant you a semi-unique poison status that can be healed by otherwise useless consumables and have the worst movement pattern of everything in Mojave.
