What Is Fallout?
Fallout is a post-apocalyptic RPG franchise, with the first titles developed by Black Isle back in the early 90s. Fallout and Fallout 2 are turn-based isometric games with thematic roots in Mad Max & spaghetti Westerns, while Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4 are first person shooter/RPG hybrids developed by Bethesda (except FONV, which was Obsidian) & full of more modern pop-culture references. Survival is a strong narrative note throughout the franchise, although these are not really survival games; you do not need to consume food/water or refine blocks of wood into planks.
With Fallout 4's recent release, this OP is going to be devoted to Tips, Bug work arounds, and Fun Stuff from that game specifically. Feel free to comment on any part of the franchise here, just realize that Fallout 4 is currently the new hotness and is dominating the discussion.
Tips from the community:
Don't know if anyone mentioned it but switching weapons auto reloads the previous gun. Useful for big guns.
VERY early free SPECIAL point (not a story spoiler)
Go find the SPECIAL book in your son's bedroom after you leave the vault. Free skill point! Spend it wisely.
Dogmeat can equip a few items! Give him a bandana or some welding goggles and you can manually tell him to 'equip' them from the trade window.
Spoilered for size from here out, no actual spoilers.
Settlements
- Local Leader Perk (Charisma 6)
- -Rank 1 allows supply lines, which means you can share the workshop inventory between two settlements (ie, all of that steel in site A can be used to build in site B. Connecting site C to site B makes it one shared pool of stuff). Once you have the perk, you establish a supply line by selecting one of your residents from one of the settlements while in the Workbench mode and one of your options will be 'Supply Line.' Once you've got that going, you can view your supply lines on the map by hitting a button (C or Q on PC, I forget)
- -Rank 2 allows you to build shops and workbenches. Shops will generate passive income based on the population of the settlement. Haven't had the chance to play with these much yet, but others may know more.
- Don't worry about placing walls/floors to match the foundation of that house you just scrapped. If you lay your floor or prefabs down first, you can snap the walls to those and it should fit pretty easily.
- However, you can place walls wherever you want. So you can absolutely fence in your entire settlement if you want to. The walls can be annoying when they snap to each other, and especially when trying to do this on hills. Where I can't make a direct connection, I at least use smaller objects to block entry.
- The game advises you to keep the defense rating of a settlement at least as high as the combined food+water production. Failing that, you'll be an easier target and see more attacks on the settlement.
- There are magazine racks (under shelving) and a Bobblehead stand you can place to hold your shit.
- The scavenging bench needs someone assigned to it, and then it will generate components for crafting
- Tip for keeping track of which settlers you've assigned to a job: Give them either a hat (which they'll probably equip) or a single piece of ammo as a marker. Anyone without the hat still needs a job!
Power Armor
- The individual parts on your armor take damage and eventually break. When they break, you're not longer getting their benefits, but you don't lose them. Repair your power armor at your settlement (need a power armor station). It's pretty damned cheap to repair (mostly steel, maybe circuitry on the torso/helm).
- Power Armor can be stolen! Someone reported that a raider actually jumped into his suit and he was unable to recover the frame with the raider dead inside (ie, he could loot the individual parts, but couldn't use the actual power armor). Consider removing the fusion core when you're not using a suit.
- That also works the other way: your enemies can't operate their power armor without a fusion core. Pickpocket the core and voila, easier target.
- Watch your hp. You might be taking some damage even if the suit's still trucking along. The HP shows on the dial on your bottom left, but I found the companion app on my phone was actually kind of handy for this too (and keeping track of how full my inventory was).
- Apparently fusion cores will sell for their full price value, even if they're 99% depleted. An empty fusion core is simply ejected from the suit, so swap yours out when it's almost done and you can sell it.
- The fusion cores last a little longer than you might think, and if you're like me and scrounging in every nook and cranny, they're more common than you might expect. Don't be afraid to use the damn thing
Modding/Crafting
- Adhesive is used in fucking everything with crafting. Thankfully, you can cook 'Vegetable Starch' which gives five adhesive per item. You'll need mutfruit, corn, tatos and purified water. The vegetables you can plant at your settlements, and dirty water can be condensed at cooking stations to make purified. If there's another way to get water I haven't seen it yet, so I advise you don't use water to restore hp unless it's your last resort.
- There is a 'tag for search' option while you're crafting things that will mark stuff out in the world. So if you have aluminum tagged, that TV dinner tray will have a magnifying glass next to its name. Try it out.
- Tag for search is a little wonky from the crafting bench, but if you view your junk in your pipboy there is an option of 'component view' and that's a little easier to work with.
- Remove any nice mods from weapons before scrapping the weapon (edit: IF YOU WILL USE IT, don't just do this willy-nilly and waste adhesive). You can swap mods in and out instead of having to craft the mod every time.
Legendary enemies and loot
- Legendary enemies drop cool shit. Kill them.
- Oh, more? OK. If you see one at the end of a 'dungeon' or whatever, you can come back later and they should be there. However, if you bump into one out in the wild, that's probably a random spawn and you either kill it now or it's gone. (reported. Haven't seen confirmation from others)
- Those Legendary weapons will have random properties, kinda of like legendary items in Diablo 2/3. Example: A rifle that does more damage as the night goes on and less in the day, or a pistol that uses 25% less AP in VATS, or a melee weapon that does more damage when your health gets low.
- You can modify them! Just take the mods off of your old 10mm pistol and slap them onto this legendary one and voila!
ini tweaks for PC users to potentially improve performance:
For those having performance issues on PC, this worked wonders for me. Blurry textures much less often and little to no more random stuttering.
From Reddit -
https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/3sdyu7/the_old_ini_tweaks_still_work/
I played around with my fallout.ini a bit, and it seems like all of the following still work (they go under [General]):
uInterior Cell Buffer=12
uExterior Cell Buffer=144
bUseThreadedBlood=1
bUseThreadedMorpher=1
bUseThreadedTempEffects=1
bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1
bUseThreadedAI=1
bUseMultiThreadedFaceGen=1
bUseMultiThreadedTrees=1
iNumHWThreads=8
iPreloadSizeLimit=524288000
Hi everybody, hi!
I wanted a way to make sure that I didn't leave a location without grabbing any magazines or bobbleheads in the area, so I made
this thing.
I hope it helps some of the rest of you as well. Let me know if I need to change/update anything for accuracy.
I made this checklist. Location info is from a random site I found just searching for the locations.
The intent is that when you collect something, you put a 1 in the first column, which adds to the totals at the top of each section. Also with sheets like this, I like to highlight the row and change the color to bright green or whatever to show that you collected it.
For adhesives, I recommend y'all get some overalls and a straw hat and start farming corn, mutfruit and tatos. Also, horde purified water.
Then go check your cooking station.
timed food buffs are real world time, not in game time
ive had radstag carry bonus on for multiple in game days, which makes it much less worthless
A list for materials and where to find them.
Right here. You can craft oil in the chemistry lab under utility.
Settlements share junk, but nothing else. Each settlement that generates a resource, like food or caps, will place it resource in the misc tab of the workshop.
Crafting gives you XP! So don't forget to cook and chemistry your way to higher levels. (Especially after a certain quest loads you up with a ton of drugs.)
(Some?) companions can wear power armor. Just issue them a Go command like you normally would, but point at the Power Armor. Apparently, they do not deplete the fusion core either. (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGnIyVn41Cs)
OP tip: Ammo types available are based on level. If you are wondering why you can never find an ammo type at vendors you problem aren't the correct level. There are random set spawns and small chances for them to spawn on vendors early but once you get the proper level they start appearing more regularly at both vendors and in boxes.
If you want to get into a locked house, find and open window and use a piece of furniture inside.
You can sit on a chair and it will pull you inside the house, where you can then unlock the door.
Settlements tip: You can move people between settlements. It's easier to take care of 4-5 high-pop settlements than 2 people everywhere. The settlers with unique names generally cannot be moved - so make those your high-pop settlements. To move people: once you have access to workbench, go into build mode and select "Move" (default: R i think) when highlighting a settler.
So clothing and outfits are upgradeable. Potentially very highly. Naturally it's locked behind a random ass sidequest for one particular faction because where else would you put it
railroad. Jackpot quest from Pam. Talking to the tinker guy opens the upgrades up.
On the bright side, it potentially seems available pretty early. Should make early game a lot less rough on other play through
Exactly which clothing is upgradeable seems largely random because why not
of course a newsboy cap can be armored and not a beret
(Warning: Spoilers for the Minutemen faction)
Some very good info! Maybe for OP even! But possibly a spoiler for a cool feature, y'know?
The mod below adds about 110 new objects to build and place in settlements. Enjoy. I0 think this would be good for the OP.
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1145/?#
There is a quest that allows you to modify more clothing pieces, but it's somewhat obscure and easy to miss. Here's a spoiler on where to find it. Warning: Contains spoilers for the Main Quest as well as the Railroad faction.
I'm a little mixed up on what order things occur or should occur as I did a bunch of the main quest line before making contact with the rail road.
I think after you take down kellog they let you into the base proper, soon afterwards drummer boy will give you a tip to talk to P.A.M who'll give you the Jackpot quest. Finish it. Then go talk to tinker tom and pray he gives you the line about ballistic vests, you'll then be able to buy armored bits from him and/or customize your own.
For anyone who was wondering what perks affect which weapons, I just did some tests;
The minigun and gatling laser are only affected by the heavy weapons perk. Commando does not affect their damage in any way.
The missile launcher is affected by both the heavy weapons perk and the demolitions expert perk, but demolitions expert does not double the missile launcher's damage; max rank demolitions expert increases the missile launcher's damage to 285.
The cryolator is a heavy weapon. The railway rifle is a rifle. If there's anything someone wants specifically checked, feel free to ask, tho everything else should be pretty self-explanatory now.
Your companions can use Power Armor without a Fusion core, so... always have them in a suit.
Tip for settlements: If you want the happiest settlements, you need the Local Leader perk at level 2, and Cap Collector at level 2. When you get Local Leader to Level 2 you can start creating shops within the settlement that will generate income and happiness based on the number of unassigned settlers, and the level of the shop.
The first level of shop only requires Local Leader 2. The second one also requires Cap Collector, and the later ones require leveled versions of that.
Each level of shop creates more income and more happiness. You want to minimize the amount of shops and maximize the amount of unassigned workers while also providing enough food, water, and defense for the town.
Shop income is accumulated every 2 in-game days and stays in that settlement's workshop until you collect it. It is not collectable from other workshops connected by supply lines, but it is available for building at any connected settlement (though shops and mines may be the only things that require caps).
Slight building tip for shops, the shops are taller than the wall height when building, so if you want one indoors you need to leave the space above it open to the second level. If you build chairs, stools and couches close to the drinks vendor then settlers, including assigned ones, will occasionally stop what they're doing, grab drinks and food from the vendor and sit down. So it's really easy to make a bar. Right after sundown all of the settlers will do this.
It's possible to get your SPECIAL attributes to 11. Do it like this:
- Level your SPECIAL to 10
- Find SPECIAL bobble head
- SPECIAL is now 11
If you find and pick up a SPECIAL bobble head before that attribute is 10, you can
not increase it to 11 after.
Amazing building tutorial by Eurogamer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CR8nOTDhh8
Didn't know about the foundations, for example. Jeez. Those are neat!
You can get purified water by having an overabundance of water resource at your settlements. I have the big 40 water purifiers sitting at a few of my settlements and the workstation inventory always has about 30+ purified water when I give it a while to fill up. Also, I tend to have an overabundance of food at most of my settlements, and I get whatever I've planted in that inventory as well.
Tried out using a sniper barrel on a laser pistol. Felt like I wasn't getting many shots off in VATs, then did a test swapping in the previous barrel. Can now confirm that sniper barrels increase the AP cost of VATS attacks significantly.
Ready to start using mods?
MegaMek has you covered.
Looking to modify clothing?
SirEtchwarts has posted a comprehensive list
For those that missed the <quest> that unlocks clothing customization...which is easy to do
If you're on pc: set RailroadClothingArmorModAvailable to 1
If you're upset that there's no perk to reveal all the map markers like in previous fallouts, type "tmm 1,0,0" in the console. Every location you haven't discovered yet becomes visible but still technically undiscovered, just like locations added by dialogue. You can see them but not fast travel to them. This has no effect on previously discovered locations.
A powered radio beacon (from Power -> Misc -> Radio Beacon) is required to attract settlers. Make sure the beacon is connected to a generator. You connect electrical systems by using (Y) on Xbox or the equivalent for other systems. The beacon is on when it has a green light, and off when it has a red light.
Got Bugs?
So the crashing to desktop with no error problem I am having is becoming more widely reported by other people, and on console versions too. It's corrupted cells triggered by... something, and prevents a few important quests from being finished. It's tied to save file and occurs after a certain point in the game so there's no way to know you'll get it until it starts happening.
For PC users some workarounds have been found, however these involve using the console to teleport or just mark the quest finished so you are going to miss out on the actual content of the quests in some cases.
The best thread I found on it is here
http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1546438-fallout-4-crash-in-specific-area/
Posts
and that some holes in the wall aren't.
the conduit can have wire attached or not and it has no effect on if the cnduit sticks or not.
trying to hang paintins in certain walls has same issue, support beams and other visible parts of the wall just don't act as contact points to attach things, causing horrible clipping issues.
electric wiring is just worse due to wires often recognicing support beams while conduits don't.
Minutemen:
Railroad:
The Institute:
Commonwealth BoS:
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
My only regret, is that i can't get a chainsword in this game.
Though Ripper gets pretty close, mod making a ripper variant that is longer, and uses sword animations is not only inevitable, but mandatory.
This will not stand. It's taken me almost a week alone to get this damn far and enough wood for the place. Going to find the mod that removes the limit. I imagine it won't be that big of a deal since I'm playing on PC and the settlement isn't lagging or anything right now, should be able to keep going just fine.
*waits for gamebryo to strike me down for my hubris*
Yeah, swap the 40k picture and I'll agree. Commonwealth BoS is basically the Midwest Brotherhood from Tactics.
Wait what? No.
The midwest brotherhood accepted mutants and ghouls into their ranks. The commonwealth are huge racists, they are not similar.
In that ending it's internment camps, summary executions, and kicking everyone who disagrees with them, human and non-human, back to the West Coast.
> hear somebody yell something like, "hey motherfucker!"
> immediately blow up
Fuck
I've made it alllllmost to the 100% without mods... though I have used tcl a few times.
This is my first time playing a Bethesda game at launch on PC so I expected I would have more self control but I guess all the time I spent modding New Vegas and Skyrim has spoiled me.
I've only downloaded about three so far (easy, hacking, full dialog interface and higher settlement budget) though. The budget and dialog interface were the only things I really really wanted to change so hopefully stability holds out and I don't get greedy.
Run around the outskirts of Sanctuary. Might be more attackers stuck on terrain or whatnot. I have this problem all the time at Greygarden, I think, with attackers stuck out west for some reason.
I am not making this up.
Yeah that's exactly what happened. People are even telling me 'glad you showed up when you did' but the 'defend' quest won't complete.
@Madican, that thing you want....you can apparently get it really easy, and I can't tell if it's a glitch or not.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Yeah, at first it didn't work for me, but then it did. Not sure what I did differently.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
I just wish they had word wrap or something, cause the text is often off the screen and I can't read all of it.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Yeah, don't be surprised if everyone else's suggestions don't help. Same thing happened to me twice. Defend doesn't clear, and as soon as you fast travel you fail it, everyone is dead and everything at the settlement is broken. However, you can fast travel back immediately to see that everyone is still alive, and all you have to do is repair everything.
But yes. There is nothing you can do. I think it might happen if you are too close to failing it before getting to the settlement. Like for example, in the time it took you to fast travel to the settlement, you failed it, but you arrived AT the settlement so the game didn't know what to tell you. Until you traveled away again. That's my theory.
It really sucks.
10 str/10 Chr/6 int. (takes book plus 1 level). The idea is that you use pacify/pain train/follower bonus damage to conserve ammo then science to make everything fantastic. Primary weapon is going to be the junk jet probably. Everything else eats ammo too fast. (Exception of the Gatling sniper laser)
I could not kill the first deathclaw without getting it stuck.
I think the game is like "well the bullet hit some debris, but you know what, the player used a crit so it HAS TO hit, just figure it out somehow," and it has to calculate for a bit and then blows up the enemy's head.
Got some that are just stuck in the floor every time I check in. Or guards that get confused as to why I built defense stations that require them to go up a very simple ladder and move forward a few steps.
Of course you can kill it easily the same way all deathclaws are in this game, by standing inside a human sized doorway where it can never reach you.
Sometimes happens if I leave vats after shooting but when it does the bullet animation. If you're following the bullet all of a sudden the bullet has travel time. Other than that, no. But my vats build has pen so doesn't have to worry about "finding a way"
I know it's even more ridiculous on a Fat Man but I feel like this is a reasonable amount of overkill. Easier to get the ammo for it, something usable that isn't just a last resort.
In fact I should name it First Resort.
When we're finally free from the Synth menace!
edit- On a more serious note, while people can think whatever they want of the BoS in F4 I do have to say that I kind of like the fact that they are waaaay more proactive than in past Fallout games. In past games getting the BoS to do anything was like pulling teeth.
Sitting on 9 fusion cores. Is there any reason not to just run around in power armor all the time?
And thanks to whoever recommended Cambridge Polymer Labs. That was a lot of fun.
My favorite thing about when you turn a rocket into a quad rocket, it only puts the barrel attachment on one of them.