What's a good time to leave the Capital Wasteland?

[generalmx]

Considering there's similar progression with low-level content in both Wastelands, and assuming we're playing on Hardcore with gameplay balancing mods like BLEED, is the earliest The Lone Wanderer can get to Mojave the better in the terms of player strength? AFAIK, even with FO3 mods, the Mojave has a lot more caps to fund better weapons and additional easy grabs of powerful items like skill books in low-level areas. Just curious.

[Puppettron]

Really depends on what you want to do. Unless you're using something that purges all the fun out of LLs, the only things you actually need to buy are the uniques that are vendor-only

[khumak]

If you ask this of 50 different people you'll probably get 50 different answers.  One of the great things about this type of open ended game.  Personally, I like to do some of the early quests like Wasteland Survival guide, Blood Ties, etc, collect some bobbleheads, and do Anchorage and The Pitt and then head to Vegas before going to the Citadel.  Once those enclave parties are active things start getting nasty.  Plus I like to pick up my favorite companion (Willow) as early as I can and she's in Vegas.

[Puppettron]

Thing is, the Mojave is designed for linear travel at the beginning, which is easy to break if you get good equipment upgrades. Just going to LR in vanilla is enough to boost you to walking straight through the meat walls to Vegas. So at this point in the game's life, it doesn't actually matter how leveled or geared you are when you get to goodsprings, because GS will always be easy and you can quickly break the newb yard in fill vanilla conditions

[generalmx]

Thanks for the info. I have this bad habit of abusing saves in Fallout and TES games due to what I attribute to wanderlust and afterwards find out it's because I wasn't "suppose to be tackling that area yet". Some might consider this major-grade cheating but it's how I enjoy the game, and part of why I use mods like BLEED which up the difficulty in a saner way. I might go for the Train Station before doing any DLC just because I want to try.

[RoyBatty]

I hit the train station about level 4 or 5.

[catofriddles]

I was planning to head over to the train station once I completed the capital wasteland. Is that not possible? Do I have to cut out in the middle of the story to progress? I just assumed there was an "after game" mode in the capital wasteland half.

[Risewild]

You can go anytime you want to. You will have to deal with some Super Mutants and Ghouls, so as long as you can do that, nothing is stopping you from going at any time.