Probably nobody cares about this by now, but I've been trying to figure out a way to get the minutemen questline to be as fast as possible. It might be as fast as the institute questline, but it would only work if you could find a way to get settlements quickly.

To do the minutemen questline, you have to eventually have 8 settlements before you're allowed to defend the castle and assault the institute. From what I can tell, you don't actually have to take them through preston. You can shoot the settlers of oberland station or abernathy farm and click on the workbench and take the settlement yourself. The problem is that you need at least 1 person in a settlement for it to count.

You can send Nick or Piper to a settlement and they count as a person, so that's 2. The castle and sanctuary will have people in them, so that's 4. For the others, you have to make recruitment beacons. This doesn't take as long as you'd think, because breaking down the equipment cart found in both the sanctuary and red rocket garages gives most of what you need. So you put recruitment beacons in 2 settlements, an as soon as settlers appear, send them somewhere else, and later more settlers will appear.

The problem is that as far as I can tell, preston still expects you to do one proper minuteman quest before he will let you defend the castle. The other problem is that all of this is still taking a bit too long. If the game could accept some of these settlements without having to put people in them, then the minutemen questline would be competitive with the institute one. As it is, it's taking 15 or 20 minutes longer than it takes me to follow the institute questline.

By the way, you kill the mirelurk queen with 3 bottlecap mines, found outside Fort Hagen. You do the tough ending quests, defending the castle and assulting the institute, in power armor, using the shredding minigun, which is massively powerful and needs no ammo. You need gun nut 2 to mod the minigun, which means you have to be level 13, which is where you'll be when you're ready to defend the castle, assuming you took some points in intelligence early on.

Petite_Miku, I'm afraid not.

Settlers are flagged as "only killable by the player", just as members of the Railroad are. I assume this is to make sure that they don't accidentally get killed by wandering supermutants or in some other accidental way, which would break settlement quests.

They just get knocked to the ground for a while and then get back up.

It actually does relate to a speedrun, but a glitchless speedrun.

The few people who have done a glitchless speedrun of fallout 4 have done it via the institute quest line. I'm trying to figure out whether it could be done quicker via the minutemen quest line. But it would only work if the settlements could be easily acquired, which would mean getting them on your own. Getting them through preston garvey takes forever.

The concord museum basically can only be done by having a companion kill at least one of the raiders. You can't get the raiders to zone out of the museum, or any ferals or supermutants or anything else to zone in. They can't kill themselves, as even if you pickpocket a fat man and mininuke onto them and they shoot you at point blank range, this just drops them down to 1 health point, they don't die. You can use the berserk syringe, or pacify and incite, to get the raiders to kill each other, but that will still leave 1 left who has to be killed.

Companion kills count as yours, so the way around this is to dismiss the companion (usually the dog, so you can do this quest first) while they're in the museum, and then they start walking home, but you make sure to dismiss them with 1 or more of the raiders between them and their path to the exit. The dog kills the raiders, the kills don't count as yours since he's not your companion at the moment. If needed, you reacquire them as a companion and then dismiss them again to get the next group of raiders. Once the dog starts attacking raiders, it tends to run around trying to kill them all, so this is pretty easy to do, as long as you don't screw up and have the dog attack a raider when he's still your companion.

For tenpines bluff (or sometimes other places you get sent to during The First Step), you are likely to be sent to the Corvega assembly plant to kill the raiders. Or you might possibly get sent somewhere else to kill raiders. If it's an indoor location, like Corvega, the good thing is that you only really need to get one raider to die, which will be the one with the name at the end. Your quest marker will point to him.

At corvega, it's Jared who must be killed. There's a protectron close to him with a novice terminal that can easily be hacked. Often the protectron will kill Jared, but often it fails and other raiders kill it first. You can also shoot Jared with a berserk syringe as long as you're not a very high level, this makes him hostile to everything in the plant and everything else will kill him. Jared is about the only named boss in the entire game who is actually susceptible to the berserk syringe, most of them are too high level for it to work, as it doesn't work on enemies over level 19 or so. The berserk syringe is the easiest most certain way of getting him killed... as long as you have one. You have to get the syringer gun, and then make the berserk syringe out of anti freeze, bourbon, dirty water, and steel.

You can also bring a companion, dismiss them in just the right spot, and have them kill Jared. There's a chained exit door basically right by Jared. Run through the plant, get to the exit door, unchain it and run out, come back in with a companion and you're conveniently just in the right spot now.

If you have to kill raiders outdoors, then you really have to kill all of them. The advantage here is that since they're outdoors, it's easy to get supermutants or whatever to follow you to kill them all. Or to dismiss your companion nearby them, and have the ex companion take them out. Note that dismissed companions never run out of ammo (at least for ballistic weapons), so you can give a companion a minigun and 1 bullet for it, and they fire with it non stop while not actually your companion.

For kellogg, you're either going to have a dismissed companion kill him, or pickpocket a fat man onto one of the synths and then pacify and incite it into nuking Kellogg. Except in a speedrun, you won't be high enough level to do any inciting, so this won't work. I can't remember whether berserk syringes work on synths, but I have a strong feeling that they don't. So a companion is going to have to do it.

The difficulty is getting the companion to Kellogg without them killing anything along the way. You can have the companion skip most of fort hagen by running through most of it and unchaining an exit door to bring the companion in, but you still have to get the companion past 2 turrets and about 10 synths. Once again, you'll have to dismiss them at just the right moment, have them kill some turrets/synths, then reacquire them.

Out of curiousity, are you going to have to take 8 settlements, or do you have skips that do away with that?

To follow the minuteman questline, you have to end up with 8 settlements. Unfortunately, you have to take whatever random settlements Preston gives you, instead of the ones you would like to take in the order you would like to take them.

You can take settlements on your own, but they don't count. Preston isn't giving you the take the castle quest until you have 4 proper minutemen settlements, and isn't giving you defend the castle until you have 8, and they have to be the ones that he gave you quests to get.

Is there a way around this?

I've done pacifist runs of Fallout 4, but not as a speed run.

The main difficulty is that lots of things have to die, and you can't kill them, and your companion can't kill them or these kills count as yours. Also, in the rescue Valentine quest, Valentine can't kill anything, or this counts as your kill. And Valentine will try to kill every triggerman he sees, and you can't tell him to stop.

Normally in a no kill run, your tools are pacify and incite, and the Pax syringe which pacifies enemies and turns them non hostile. You can also dismiss a companion, who will then turn around and walk home, but if they happen to encounter an enemy along the way, they will attack and kill them, and their kill won't count as yours now. So, dismiss the dog in the middle of the Concord museum, for example, and let the dog kill all the raiders.

The big problem for a speed run is that you need to be level 21 to incite creatures to attack things and level 23 to incite humans to attack things.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a no kill run can ONLY be done using the minuteman quest line. Each of the other quest lines have at least one quest that simply cannot be done without kills. (For example, killing everyone in the Railroad. They are all flagged so that only you can kill them. They can't kill themselves or each other and companions can't kill them)

So, you gotta rescue the minutemen, get the deathclaw killed, rescue valentine, kill kellogg, get a bunch of settlements, take the castle, do old guns, defend the castle, and assault the institute. Because Preston gives you random settlements, every single playthrough will involve you doing different settlements in a different order, so that kills any chance of planning this part out.

You have to spend most of your time without a companion, because your companions will attack everything they see and then their kills count as yours and you fail the playthrough.

It's either gonna be a super slow speed run, or you're gonna just be halfassing your way through the whole thing, by constantly dismissing and reacquiring your companion and watching them get kills which don't count as yours, which is a pretty cheap way of doing this run but it's the only way you can do it without getting to level 23 and doing it properly.

A no kill playthrough is actually a fun and interesting way of playing the game, because it's so completely different from everything you normally do and you have to come up with new ways of handling all the game's challenges. But I'm not sure it's really compatible with a speed run. Then again, I haven't tried it, maybe someone can find a reasonable way.