Hi folks
I have a question about the known bug which apparently players can exploit at the end of the Water Chip Quest to give you extra time limits. That is, when you finally have the chip and are ready to give it to the Overseer....you can press '0' in conversation with him to keep the Chip in your Inventory, and apparently you can restart the quest by triggering it at the water Merchants or by re-installing in the Necropolis Vault.
So any way, the question is, pressing '0' does indeed allow you to keep the Chip in your Inventory. And the text asks you to finalise by going back to the overseer. but you don't yet have the mutant quests. So does that mean there are no time limits at all to your game until you actually speak to him again to get the mutanty quests in your Pipboy?
It just seesm it might be a way of exploiting the bug in a slightly different way

Why would you want to exploit a bug when all time limits are removed once you finish the waterchip quest?

Edit: To clarify: once you finish the waterchip quest, you're free to explore and do any quests at your own pace, without any time constraints.

Simply because I read in several places that the 'kill the Mutants' quests impose a new time limit themselves !
Perhaps this refers to an earlier version, was this completely removed in a patch or something?

No, it's just that finishing the last quest finishes the game, so you want to explore and do sidequests before the final confrontation. But there's no time limit for all this once you save Vault 13 with the waterchip.

Before the game was ever released the mutant army would slowly conquer everything in the wasteland and kill everyone in its path. That was changed before the game went on sale, but some mods give you the option to turn it back on. There was never a strict time limit though. If you waited too long you would enter the Hub and everyone would be dead and there would be mutants everywhere.