Patient Gamers

Up to around level 50 or so, mobs are squishy enough that you don't need weapons perks at all. Eventually, some super mutants become bullet sponges, and you'll want some kind of damage boost, either weapon perks or just taking lots of combat drugs as needed.

I like to start new games with a focus on Science and Barter. With one point of Science, you can build Industrial Water Purifiers in your settlements. The excess water they produce can be sold to vendors.

Unique leg armor that increases your movement speed can be purchased in Goodneighbor and Vault 81. The Vault 81 vendor also sells the last gun you'll ever need. I like to trade water for those ASAP.

Next, there's a quest from The Railroad that gives a HUGE defensive boost.

The Nukaworld expansion introduced a new kind of knife, the Disciples Blade, and it is by far the best melee weapon in the game. A sneaky ninja melee build wielding a Disciples Blade can beat every encounter. The build doesn't really blossom until the late-late game, but once it does, you'll never need to use a gun again.

This game ruined my interest in Fallout as a series. I'd played everything in the series from the isometric ones onwards but something about this one made me lose interest in the setting. Some kind of Fallout burnout maybe.

I stopped playing when it tried to force me to engage with the crafting mechanics in order to do the Institute level.

I've heard the Far Harbour DLC is good I guess so maybe make a beeline for that

If you want to do the settlement building, get the local leader perk 2, it will allow you to share resource with all the settlement you have, provided you assign a settler to do it. Better yet, mod that perk in, i think it's an essential feature locked behind 2 perk point and some charisma stats, since the story treat you like a high charisma anyway.

Melee is totally viable, couple with sneak and Blitz perk it you can clear an area easily. Run if you hear beeping noise coming at you.

Ah same here.The series triggered me to get the GOTY on the cheap and dive into it. Have been hooked non-stop for the past days.

As is tradition, Bethesda games are not even worth playing without mods. FO4 inv management is just pull-nails-out attrocious and mandatory to play the game at non-braindead difficulties. So better inventory management is a must for me.

And if you want to do anything with the settlements that doesn't waste infinite amount of time, Sim Settlements 2 just dropped and it's great!

Myself I've been mostly doing sidequests until now and only started going into the main quest now, still quite impressed how well the difficulty scaling holds up.

I've set up half a dozen settlements and spend way too much time equipping the settlers there. Hoping this will be more useful later. Haven't had to use flares yet though, need to get into the habit of doing it instead of relying on chem and stims to get through combat.

Maybe a controversial suggestion, but my advice is to ignore the Minutemen stuff until late in the game. Just don't even go to the museum until you've followed some leads and want something else to do for a bit.

This is definitely not the intended way to play, but I promise the story flows so much better without it. Setting out to find your kidnapped son just to immediately get sidetracked helping some uncharismatic misfits set up mattresses is just an underwhelming start to an otherwise decent game.

Doing all this stuff later on, when you've actually demonstrated you're a badass survivor and the OP gear you get free from the Minutemen quest actually feels earned, just feels much smoother. It's a great coda that they unf put two minutes into the game for some reason.

Something you need to unlearn if your Fallout experience is primarily from FNV is that the quest design in FO4 is far more linear. The designers of FNV did a lot of work to ensure that you could complete basically any quest in lots of different ways, including talking, crafting, thinking, or sneaking to avoid combat. The design of FO4 follows the FO3 school of thought, which is more "this is a game about fighting stuff, you're going to have to fight stuff"

If you find yourself running low on caps build as many water purifiers in Sanctuary as you can power.

Water and ammo are better currency than caps.

Like Skyrim this one is far more playable in third person, and I really recommend giving that a try.

If you want faster leveling get the luck perk idiot savant, and keep your intelligence low.

Ammo seems far more plentiful than 3 in my experience, at least early on. You eventually get near infinite ammo anyway. One minorly annoying thing is that DLC weapons can drop in the commonwealth, but no one sells ammo for them outside the DLC.

You will eventually want to pick a weapon type and put some points in it. The bonuses are huge. Perhaps more important are the crafting perks to keep up on upgrades to weapons and armor.

There's a lot if focus on settlement building, but it's a huge pain and not super rewarding in my experience.

It's been a hot minute since I last played F4. But now that a friend of mine roped me into F76 I've been itching to get some F4 action in between the sparse F76 sessions, esp. since the big update is just around the corner.

IIRC the perks system in F4 requires you to have stats in the SPECIAL -stats to open up the stat related perks, and then choose to spend the perks points to those instead of the stats. Other perks are given as rewards from (side?) quests - if memory serves, but it's been a while.

I did enjoy the adventuring aspeects of F4, but the settlement management was pure agony. The more you build the settlements, the more attractive they become for mutant/bandit/whatever attacks. If you don't build them, the settlers moan about not having places to sleep or food to eat. Even if you build them everything, the idiot settlers can't figure out themselves to start farming if there's no food, instead they require the player to specifically assign them for the task.

Other than the settlement management, the game is great, but as it's bethesda creation it gets better with mods. I recall esp. enjoying mod which removed ambiguity from dialogue choises and just showed the actual lines instead of "snarky" or "okay" or whatever.

As far as companions go, I do enjoy "the private detective" as a companion, if I had to choose, but mostly I prefer going in alone, as the companions can be dumb as left boots. Died so many times because the idiots walk into all the traps imaginable. And the "stealth archer" doesn't need companions, they're powerful and broken like in every Bethesda -game :P

Last time I played my VATS got glitched and didn't work anymore, apparently this has something to do with vault 114 & is a known issue. Didn't bother me one bit and I kept on playing without it. IMO, the game got better without VATS.

Tips? Nah, you do you. The game turns into power fantasy regardless of what you do. But in general talk to everyone and do listen in on the radiochannels which can pop out randomly out there, there's always something cool or funny to find.

The one thing I wish I knew at the start is that regular armor/clothing bonuses don't apply when in power armor. Unfortunately, that's the bulk of what you'll find from legendary enemies, so it makes loot a lot less fun. Power armor with legendary bonuses is very rare. There are many viable builds without power armor, but they are likely to be challenging for a new player.

Also if anyone knows of a mod that makes recon scopes reliable (I swear I can't mark anything with just a damn twig in the way), or if they've recently patched that, I'd love to hear about it.

I enjoyed it so much more in Survival mode, but with a "save anytime" mod.

I thought fo4 was underwhelming, but I'm exited to play the fallout 4: london mod which is supposed to drop as soon as possible after the patch, depending on how quickly the script extender gets updated to work with the new version.

It's set before fallout 1 I think and it won't have a lot of fallout staples like the pip boy, super mutants or the brotherhood of steel which I think will be a nice change since it feels like Bethesda have overused them a lot. A lot of the promotional material looks fantastic and they seem to have a lot of cool ideas and a professional approach to modding.

The new vegas modding community has kind of a bad track record when it comes to large modding projects but I feel optimistic about folon, but it might be good to temper that optimism with a little bit of caution anyway.

If you have the traders set up between your settlements with the Local Leader perk, you can choose to make food and water in one place and let it get distributed automatically. . The bandit raids are based on how much food and water settlements have, so most of your settlements will get raided only rarely. There is a downside, which is that every dang settler in the other towns will complain that there isn't enough food and water, because they don't know to look at the trader network.

Also, raids spawn in a place randomly clean from list for each settlement. Building walls isn't going to save you in every settlement because there is often a spawn location within the settlement. I'm not still salty about it after building a wall and turrets and lights all the way around sanctuary's island only to have raids down in the middle of the settlement, why do you ask?

Also, I've never used VATS in a 3d fallout game, so be aware it's totally possible to just skip it entirely and save your points for other skills.

Piper's affinity perk is only useful if you get it early on.

My main advice is to try to get everything you can to level up quickly, the loot pool doesn't really get interesting until level 20 or so, you'll find nothing but laser pistols and pipe guns before that.

Just explore and concentrate on vats. Unfortunately with the gutted dialogue system it starts to feel same but it can be fun. Concentrate on vats perks as it still has thar janky Fallout aim system:X

I have a ton of hours in that game, I enjoyed building bases and most of the game, my favorite dlc is far harbor

You can do a teleporting melee build my guy, the skills REALLY open it up, get creative.

Iwonder how open it is with the perks system, or will I have to put levels into gunplay at some point?

It's fairly open. You can take any perk's first level so long as you have the necessary SPECIAL for it, and then each additional level of every perk has its own level requirement.

You will probably want some gunplay perks though, just because it's the only way to increase your damage and as things start scaling up, shit becomes hella bullet spongey (unless you play in Survival mode).

And don't disable the cinematic dialogue camera; there are two points (one of which is in the main quest; specifically the conversation between Piper and the Mayor the first time you go to Diamond City) that have been bugged from launch and never fixed in the official game or unofficial patch that will prevent you from progressing because you literally get locked into place and the inputs stop responding so all you can do is open the menu and load or quit (which doesn't fix the problem). Having the dialogue camera on is the only way to not experience this bug.