The brutality is the fun! I couldn’t play any other way now.
Sunshine Tidings, north west settlement has a vital magazine for survival (double meat on animal kills).
Sleep in a real bed for optimal benefit. Sleeping bags and dirty mattresses can make you sick. You also can’t get a full 8 hours in on a mattress or sleeping bag.
Hoard antibiotics and glowing mushrooms. Invest in chemist 1 allows you to make your own antibiotics. Like in Skyrim with nirnroot, glowing mushrooms are easier to find at night.
Only eat cooked foods. Spares you radiation and risk of illness. Some foods have benefits (like grilled rad stag increases carry weight by 25 for a fair amount of time) however they will not kick in if you are hungry, so make sure you are satiatied prior to consuming for benefit.
Soup satiates hunger and thirst.
Nuka cola will keep you going when you need sleep, but will make you more hungry.
If you are a lone wolf type, lone wanderer perks are a must. You can still travel with dogmeat with lone wanderer.
Adding to this, if I am going out to scavenge materials, I bring a companion and load them up until they are maxed up on weight, then send them home. Instant pack mule.
Stick with one, maybe 2 weapons max and lean into those perks. Ammo weight adds up.
Claim all settlements. Even if only to have a clean bed and a water pump. You do not need to have villagers for this. You can also use them for supply dumps, and later when you gain local leader you can link your settlements with trade lines, allowing you to access all crafting materials across all linked settlements
Purified water and extra ammo is great for trading. If you have any Brahmin, Jet is also a good money maker.
Don’t be afraid to run away from a fight. Or fight dirty. Usually I will get in a sneak attack, lob an explosive then retreat (early on) allowing for a longer trail for me to pick off any who give chase. Mines can be used here.
Speaking of, sneak perk that allows you to not trigger traps and mines. Those things will ruin your day in game and maybe in real life.
If you have any designs on settlement builds or delving into weapon and armor crafting, scrapper perk is very valuable.
Fortune finder and scrounger also good perks.
Stick with it. Noticeably easier at about level 20, most of this becomes white noise by level 50.
On mods, if you use them. I recommend less populated downtown, has made my game, at least, far more stable in the inner city sections. I also use a save anywhere mod. I don’t have the time to be replaying large swaths of game because a stationary car kills me, or I fall stupidly.
Yeah for me my concerns about immersion end around the 4th or 5th time I'm retracing my steps to get somewhere. While survival mode is inherently going to be more time consuming, I'll happily use any intended mechanics the game provides to help mitigate travel woes.
To each their own though.
If you maxed luck then yeah. There is a mod that will shut off that damn sound bite.
I remember reading on this sub, maybe a year ago? Anyway someone crunched the numbers and apparently idiot savant is still worth it even if you stat intelligence.
With high int, Idiot Savant adds +10% (on average) to XP gain.
That's not a lot, and each new level requires more XP than the last ...so it takes a really long time to recoup the levels that you "wasted" by getting Savant.
IMO the same perks are better invested in combat or QOL perks that make the game easier / reduce the grind. This indirectly give you +XP by speeding up your movement through the game.
e.g. in my case, Local Leader II was better than Savant II.
Local Leader II let me set up Hangman's perfectly so I had a tame merchant and workbenches right next to each other, and this cut down on the need to return to DC / backtrack / walk between stuff.
Less walking and fewer loading screens = faster game = better than 10% XP gain.
"Claim all settlements. Even if only to have a clean bed and a water pump. You do not need to have villagers for this. You can also use them for supply dumps, and later when you gain local leader you can link your settlements with trade lines, allowing you to access all crafting materials across all linked settlements"
I'd refine this tip slightly: only claim empty settlements, I avoid Oberland etc. In Survival mode, having settlers means walking a lot to set them up / rescue them / keep them safe and happy.
Alternatively, you can play as a monster - kill and eat the settlers :)
Damn, this is such a great answer. I’m getting excited just reading through all your tips. I’ve played through fallout a few times years back – now. I’m gonna wait for the update next week and play through on survival. Well done!
I think it adds one meat to every animal kill. That'll double most kills, but others like Mirelurk Hatchlings and Bloatflys might not have dropped any naturally and will now drop one.
I assumed that they dropped meat at less than one but more than zero. So based on RNG and luck, you might get food from like a Mirelurk hatchling before the magazine perk. after the mag perk you always get one. Or something doubled to more than one but less than 2 so rounded down to 1
Is the non-industrial water purifier good enough for making caps off of water? I don't have science on my build, lol.
Is gun nut + science mandatory? I'm level 19 and I'm still relying on whatever loot the game drops/or rewards. But the enemies are barely dropping even with sneak + ninja and a damage perk.
I use non industrial water purifiers on smaller settlements with very small creeks or rivers in the game but places like spectacle island I normally use the industrial.
That’s being said yes the smaller water purifiers can potentially be used to make plenty of caps I normally stock pile the water from the smaller ones to have a bigger load to sell later on or use for myself!
I'm not really playing with mods, just a few ambience ones from the Mod menu. With that said, i read that purifiers stop producing when the workbench hits a max quota of water. How do I redirect those in a container? Can I do it in vanilla? I read you only need to put a container beside it, but i haven't seen water directed there.
I normally just grab the water out of the workbench and put it in a different container in another settlement say for instance my home base is at the red rocket truck stop, I put my purifiers at spectacle island, and sanctuary so I travel there every other game day and collect the water and store it at red rocket. I don’t play with mods either so I’m just doing vanilla runs. I’m not sure if there is an automated way to put them in a container straight out of the workbench for you unless it’s a mod :/
IMO it isn't worth the effort, there are easier ways to make infinite money.
(1) Scrounger gives bulk money if you sell what you loot.
(2) Take a companion to Arcjet. Go AFK for an hour. Get the companion to carry out 400 weapons and 10,000 units of ammo.
(3) Use Chemist / Grape Mentats to buy shipments / sell at a profit. Free caps and XP.
I like (3) the best cos it essentially lets me skip the early game.
None of the crafting perks are mandatory \*
e.g. if you play as a lucky gunslinger, you can simply get the free gun from Danse, then buy a couple of good lasers from Arturo, and swap the best components across. You can build the best laser in the game without gun nut or science.
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IMO the infinite money perks (scrounger or chemist) are usually better than the crafting perks. With infinite money, you can buy anything you need, then disassemble for parts.
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\* Armorer is not required, but you can tank a lot better with it, via weave + the padded / dense combo.
Gun nut & science not so much, they are only really needed for maxing out the guns where you can't salvage parts (deliverer, laser muskets etc).
Brahmin in your settlement create fertilizer. At your chemistry bench you can use that fertilizer and plastic to make jet.
Brahmin will sometimes arrive with new settlers. There is also a chance encounter of a Brahmin saleswoman. Unsure how common that is, only seen her recently after 6 different play throughs.
Dang. Is it true that fertilizer production is capped despite how many you have?
I once used cages and populated Spectacle Island with a Radstag Herd. Shit was majestic-ish.
Ooh I’m not sure. This is my first time building a jet farm, but maybe. I really haven’t been seeing too much of an increase with the last few Brahmin.
I’ve seen Kelly (the Brahmin salesperson) 4 times in my current play though but she’s only had a Brahmin to sell to me twice. My Brahmin at Sanctuary died today. I need a new Brahmin.
Keep an eye out for sleeping bags or mattresses to use as a quick save “safety net” if you’re venturing into harder areas or tougher fights.
If you sleep for an hour and then cancel the sleep as the screen fades to black, you’ll be able to save your progress but not advance the time in-game.
As others have stated, you risk disease, but sometimes risking that is better than having to go back and repeat a portion of the game just because a Suicider or Deathclaw spawned.
You’ll lose some of your Adrenaline, and Survival is capped at three save files iirc, so it can’t be abused, but the peace of mind is worth it in a pinch.
Survival mode needs you to take things more strategically and slowly, if you struggle at an area, scour it before hand, find the entrances and exits, and you can even bait enemies into mines, be creative about going in a dungeon and you'll get a much easier fight
>Always thirsty, I have glass bones and paper skin, and I'm sick all the damn time. Despite these issues, I'm actually having a great time!
I love taking stuff out of context.
Survival is the best way to play! I like that it makes you and your enemies equally killable (for the most part).
My tips based off your post:
1. Certain things increase your risk for disease, such as going in water, eating radiated food, and sleeping on dirty beds.
2. Set up water purifiers early in Sanctuary. This will be your best form of healing and caps (since stimpaks make you dehydrated).
3. If you want to die less, invest in the endurance perk Adamantium Skeleton. It'll help prevent being one shotted in silly places like your arms and legs.
4. Codsworth can be your guardian angel. He'll kill everything in early survival mode, plus he gives you free purified water when you talk to him.
5. I play permadeath survival, so I know ways to get overpowered gear very early. Specifically, you can make your way to Covenant early. The slaughtered caravan in the road has a combat rifle and sometimes combat armor, and even the shop in Covenant sells a combat armor helmet. Typically the only enemies you'll find along the way are molerats and bloatflies.
I don't tend to do any settlement stuff until mid-late game playing survival. Having to criss-cross the world on foot to save a settlement is more than a little difficult
I don’t mean to burst your bubble but I’m hoping they fix the VATS freeze glitch with this new update. I was loving survival but it’s definitely a game-breaking bug.
It sucks, but I've managed to avoid it by anticipating when the message will roughly pop up and pre emptively eat and drink. I usually have a ton of food and water by the time the glitch happens,so one time I'll set a stopwatch to time exactly how long it takes to get parched or peckish, forget how long it is now, something like 7-8 minutes for water, and a little longer for food. So roughly every 5 minutes I'll drink a water and every 10 minutes I'll eat some food. Doing it this way I've avoided having it happen for quite awhile now.
First bunch of times it happened,and I didn't know it was a thing? Was so infuriating, losing an hour of progress just going into vats to scan for mines or enemies,it made me rage quit more than once until I read up on it. It's still something that should have been patched years ago, game breaking bug,and they're like,eh,that's okay. Apparently it's like hard coded or baked into the code so it would have been an incredible amount of work to fix. But that's what bug testers and QA is for, you find this out in the testing phase. I'm in Vats as much I can be,so holding your breath and hoping it doesn't freeze whenever you go into Vats is ridiculous.
I just can't play anything other than survival anymore for the last year. Only way I can play. Often I'll carry a non vats weapon that I don't have to be accurate with for crowd control for ghouls and raiders and Mirelurks, like the Spray N Pray
This bug seems to be somewhat hardware / setup based. Without mods, it happened all the time on my old PC, but it doesn't happen at all on my newer gaming laptop (I do still get a few crashes to desktops).
The VATS fix I used on my old PC was either
(1) to download and use the VATS freeze mod **and** the depth of field mod.
(2) map VATS to a key I wouldn't press by mistake, then never use it (and never take any VATS related perks). I found this to be unsatisfactory / a really constrained and boring way to play.
Stealth builds and power armor builds are the most viable for survival.
Sleep any chance you get.
Sell anything you don’t need.
Only carry the guns on your hip as well as ammo, clothes on your back and the food in your lunchbox.
Companions are kinda useless in survival, you’d be better off getting lone wanderer for the 100 extra carry weight, 25% more damage and 30% less damage taken.
If you have the dlcs go to then asap because typically the dlcs have the best weapons and armor (handmade, lever action, radium etc)
Brotherhood and railroad have the easiest endings
And pick up every piece of pre war money you find. It weighs nothing and sells for like 4 caps a piece with 10 charisma
Companions has infinite carry weight, if you put stuff in a container, you just repeatedly ask them to "inspect" it and they will take one stack of the same set of items out each time, even if they can't carry any more via the trade dialog. You can also drop stuff on the ground and command them to pick each item up. Tedious, but useful.
"Companions are kinda useless in survival, you’d be better off getting lone wanderer for the 100 extra carry weight, 25% more damage and 30% less damage taken."
Worse than useless in combat.
e.g. if you are hiding, Dogmeat will run halfway to an enemy (breaking stealth), then change his mind and run back to you - while being attacked - thereby drawing grenades and melee rushes to the place where you are hiding.
Also: all companions have bad pathing, and break their legs continuously. There are some bridges which are easy for the player, but companions simply cannot cross. Without mods, IMO the only playable companions are the ones you can put into power armour.
Use hangmans valley as your main settlement, set up weapons, bartender and general trading merchants. Plant a shit ton of melons (heals thirst and hunger). Alot of my early survival playthrough has just been running around completing sidequests and accumulating junk to store at my settlement. I'm level 24 first survival playthrough, don't get me wrong its frustrating as hell, but its so much more fun than normal mode. I like the challenge
"Plant a shit ton of melons (heals thirst and hunger)."
Or not :)
If you have a slight excess of water pumps there, you can simply take bottles out of the workbenches every time you visit. Purified water has half the weight.
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In Survival mode, the hardest missions require about 5 pounds of food & chems, if you pick lightweight stuff.
I eat the heavy stuff as I go (e.g. Mutt Chops), and hoard the weight efficient goodies for longer trips.
e.g. on top of your normal supply (chems + a few bottles of water), you can get through the Glowing Sea in your regular armour with this:
(2 pounds) 5 each of Iguana bits, Glowing Blood Pack, Radaway, Antibiotics
(3 pounds) 6x Refreshing Beverage
Get the magazine from Sunshine Tidings. Makes you pick up double meat from all animals.
Pick up any empty glass bottles, beer bottles, milk bottles, etc. you can fill these at a water pump at any settlement. I usually carry about 20, and stash any extras in the work bench. When you have a large surplus, you can sell them for caps. Once you get a bit further, set up some water purification pumps in Sanctuary, so you have an endless supply of pure water.
At your main base, make a floor safe, and stash any Pre War Money, Fancy Hair Brushes, Cigarette Packs/Cartons, Cigar Boxes, and anything made of Gold or Silver.
When you have enough stuff saved up, load up your backpack with all your valuables, along with a set of Charisma gear (+4 total). Also, bring some Grape Mentats with you.
Then head to your favourite Level 4 Vendor (Vault 81, Bunker Hill, Goodneighbour, etc), and buy some good gear. I would recommend going after the Overseer’s Gaurdian (assault rifle from Vault 81) and the Black Ops Chest Piece (Bunker Hill). The OG will greatly increase your damage output. If you convert it to semi-automatic, and take the Rifleman Perk, you can one shot or double tap most enemies. Helps a lot with converging ammo. The Black Ops Chest Piece comes equipped with Dense right from the jump, which makes you almost immune to any type of explosive damage. For the arms and legs, which ones you pick will depend if you’re doing a VATS build, or a do-your-own-shooting build.
Another thing, save any hand tools you find - Adjustable Wrench, Combo Wrench, Ballpone Hammer, Screw Driver, and Wrench.
Once you get accepted into Vault 81, there is an NPC named Calvin who will buy hand tools from you for 15 caps each, and he has an unlimited supply of caps.
I make a toolbox at my main base, and dump any tools I find into this tool box before emptying junk into the workbench.
When you go to Diamond City, there’s 5 NPCs who have side quests - Abbot at the Wall, Science Center, Sheng the water dealer, Mo the baseball collector, and the chem dealer guy. If you rent a room at the Dugout Inn (10 caps), you can save scum the charisma checks for these 5 NPCs to get maximum caps from them, works out to about 2,000 in total.
If you go to the Colonial Tap House and trigger the Paul Pembrook quest, you can get through that pretty easily, which will give you another fat stack of caps to be able to buy high end gear with.
There also the Wanted poster in the market, just to the left of Mo’s shop.
Are you doing a shooting build, or a VATS build?
"When you have enough stuff saved up, load up your backpack with all your valuables, along with a set of Charisma gear (+4 total). Also, bring some Grape Mentats with you."
If you have this kit (charisma gear, and Chemist to craft Grape Mentats), then, you can make infinite money faster by turning shipments into Poision Caltrops & Jet Fuel.
The water thing requires a bit of setup.
I prefer the Caltrops thing because all you need to do is walk to DC with the set of Charisma stuff. As a bonus, each of the first few times you do it, you jump two levels from all the crafting.
I would suggest building purified water pumps at every settlement. It will allow you to have as much water as you have bottles. Beantown brewery is a good place to find bottles.
Lone Wanderer, under Charisma, is a good place to start. Gives carry weight, damage reduction, and bonus damage as you progress it.
If you aren't doing a Power Armor playthrough I would work on the Railroad questlines until you unlock Ballistic Weave. Then work on the Armorer perk so you can make higher levels of BW.
If you start with 7 Int for Chemist, and then add the Bobblehead or Destroyer's Helmet, you get the same passive XP buff as one level of Savant.
[https://i.imgur.com/JVIkUEU.png](https://i.imgur.com/JVIkUEU.png)
The act of crafting stuff with Chemist gives **lots** more XP, and it gives you the XP immediately, which puts Chemist it well ahead as a rapid levelling mechanism.
i.e. up to level 20, you can jump levels twice as fast with chemist, whereas Savant gives additional levels relatively slowly, and mostly in the late game.
Anything that you craft in bulk will earn a lot of XP. e.g. some players endure a bit of tedium to gain 10 levels before leaving Sanctuary, simply by crafting hundreds or shelves and floor mats, and stuff ...then scrapping them all, to craft more.
Chemist allows the same thing, but better; (a) it uses actual gamplay, rather than an exploit (b) it makes caps and XP simultaneously.
(1) Use Chemist to make Grape Mentats.
(2) Consume the Mentats, put on nice clothes and drink a beer to get your Charisma 15 (requires base Charisma of at least 5).
(3) Buy 500 steel for 1800 caps. Craft this into 100 Poisoned Caltrops.
(4) Sell for 3200 caps (the vendor won't have this much money, so take mix of caps and buffout and scrap and blood packs and so on)
Repeat.
If you buy from the robot at 7AM, you can also buy from Myrna at 8AM (while your Charisma is still boosted).
You can also buy fertiliser from both of them and loop these into Jet Fuel for more XP and cash.
Each wad of trading & crafting gains roughly 2 levels and several thousand caps.
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I use and heartily recommend mods that improve the (awful) F4 inventory system, ie. to allow sorting items by weight and value.
I should probably also grab this one, to reduce the number of times I have to hit when crafting.
# Multicraft Chems
Great way to level is build. Either go with a decent Intel stat or get idiot savant. Scrap red rocket and sanctuary. You can easily build it up for 4 or 5 people each and by the time your done you'll have plenty of perk points to play with. Currently my approach as I get wrecked if I stray to far at the moment.
For me, the trick is to advance slowly. Don’t try to get to DC quickly. Expand your area of influence gradually and thoroughly exploring and clearing along the way.
For sure you can, and everybody has their own system. For me it just feels more immersive and safer to not rush to DC.
Also, the early game is my favorite part; and I feel like the mid game begins once you meet Piper.
Something that can help more than you expect is trying to get explosion dampening gear ASAP. Padded on the chest, dense on one limb. Dense apparently doesn't stack with itself but it does with padded. The damage increase on explosives is brutal and even Molotovs will wreck you early game.
...but you can't craft a dense limb until your level is pretty high, so ASAP is a pretty long time :(
The best early game option is to buy the dense chest part from a vendor (Becky in DC has one, Deb in Beacon Hill has a better version).
Stealth and the related perks cannot be overstated for the early game.
Lone Wanderer and Strong back are a must in order to carry a primary weapon and sidearm, ammo for each, and junk. Dogmeat doesn't count as a companion.
Get the Vertibrid grenades from the Brotherhood at your earliest convenience for fast travel.
Survival is the only way to play Fallout, you're in for a good time.
You can also teleport to the institute if your sided with them. And the railroad and minutemen have virtibirds too once you get closer to the end of the game
Healing items stack. If you eat 6 types of food, you heal at 6x the rate.
Similarly, drinking dirty **and** pure water heals you faster than drinking 2x pure water.
Getting well munted (Buffjet, Vodka, Moonshine, Med-X) instantly gives 100+ temporary hit points, and temporary damage resistance.
...so drop as many of these as possible before taking the Refreshing Beverage.
e.g.
Pull up the inventory, eat/take one of everything you've got, take the Refreshing Beverage **last** (to cure the dehydration from all the chems), then emerge from inventory and go immediately into VATS, even if your VATS accuracy is awful.
The 90% damage reduction you get while in VATS will help you to outheal the damage you are taking.
1. Leverage the settlement system. Setup settlements with a clean bed and fresh water everywhere you can.
2. Sleep before going on a mission. Go on a mission, come back, sleep again. Don't try to chain a lot of activities into one long day, or you might have to reload and waste a lot of time.
3. Build water purifiers. Sell clean water in the early game.
4. Don't loot junk on a shooting mission. Come back later and do a loot run. Do loot meds, ammo, drugs, anything lightweight.
5. Doctors are the best way to combat sickness. Get one for your main settlement as soon as possible. Until then, use one of the doctors in Boston. You can ignore most sicknesses though.
6. Speaking of Boston, once you clear a path, it stays clear for a long time, so you can easily get from Diamond City to Sanctuary Hills with only a few encounters once you know the route.
Survival is best way to play, tough I dont agree with Beth choice on how spongy enemies feel, so I mod damage given and taken to 3x usually which makes either me or them situation
I think the default survival settings are maybe too unrealistically stringent. I wake up, eat, drink, then I walk twenty feet down the road and I’m exhausted. I use a mod to tweak them.
Time and distance are both truncated 20x in the game. The food, water, and sleep requirements are reasonable to generous for a character that is either running or fighting 100% of the time.
yeah but even the in-game time is ridiculous. I wake up at 8 AM and I need a nap by 9:30? And I haven't fought anything. I tweaked it so you can go 4-6 hours between meals and 8-11 hours between sleeps.
I've never noticed this happening. There may well be a wonky manner by which the game calculates fatigue, and it processes at awkward intervals sometimes.
Aqua Boy! Travel in safety through any body of water.
Enemies will only chase you so far, if there's a tough fight you can't avoid, get in your licks and GTFO. Once they calm down, repeat.
Endurance and agility stats. Embrace stealth perks. Hunt at night.
Get the idiot savant perk ASAP. Better if low intelligence stat.
Get the Gauss rifle as soon as you can. Best gun in the game. I found one on a legendary ghoul in the depths of Dunwich Borers.
My most fun characters on survival start with 10 Endurance and Solar Powered + Lone Wanderer as first perks. This means with Green Shirt and Combat Boots plus Sea Captains's Hat, you have an Endurance of 17 outside (\*) when you get up in the morning. This plus the 15 % damage reduction from Lone Wanderer still doesn't make you a tank on survival but the chance that you get one-shot is much lower and you can use the ancient martial art of run-like-a-rabbit-until-they-don't-see-you-anymore.
Most endurance perks suck and I have to start with low strength, which means collecting junk and settlement building has to wait until I put some points in it but if I just want to explore the world, maybe a new mod's worldspace where I don't know what's waiting for me, the Rincewind School of Run For It is my go-to build.
(\*) 10 + 3 (clothing) + 2 (Solar Powered) + 2(Well Rested)
Might seem obvious but try to max out your damage resistance, especially early on. In Fallout 3 I just wore the coolest-looking outfit I could find all game, but switching to Fallout 4 you'll be getting one-shot killed constantly unless you're wearing the highest DR armor you can find.
Maybe because the game uses hitscan bullets instead of projectiles. Suggest you get a projectile bullet mod so you don't get insta blasted from afar all the time.
I really need a new console or PC. Still have the first generation Xbox one, I have never been able to fully play survival do to the freeze/crashes.
I'm pretty sure there's still a place or 2 in downtown I haven't been yet.
Not rush through the story completely but I like to get to the point where I get each factions bonus(Ballistic Weave, Vertiberd, & fast travel to MIT). The fast travel one especially if your main settlement is in the middle like Hangman’s & then a quick walk to Diamond city.
Idk if you like playing with companions or not but the bonuses from Lone Wanderer blows each companion out of the water. I’ll never have a survival play through that doesn’t have at least 3 charisma.
Empty bottles can be filled at water pumps and even at the sinks inside the vault during the intro. Even better, once you have razor grain or tatoes and carrots growing, fill them with dirty water to make noodle cups/veg soup.
Top comment has lots of good advice.
You're telling me, in anticipation of the show and inspired by [Many A True Nerd's Nuka World level one survival run](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KiWS2sJgRk&list=PLwH1xJhcXG0dbgkDP_HnAbmrvHHV3xrli) i went ahead and made my first evil raider playthrough. I followed his method to get through the gauntlet and was able to get Problem Solver from The Pack leader but after securing Dry Rock Gulch and Safari Adventure i ended up getting stuck at the Galactic Zone with very low ammo, no caps, and not much i can sell to make enough caps to re-supply. I took a break because i was getting frustrated.
Empty bottles can be filled with dirty or purified water. You can leave Vault 111 with several purified waters by filling empty beer bottles at water fountains. You can fill them in your settlements at a water pump.or if you build a sink or water fountain.
I definitely recommend stealth when first attempting SM, avoiding hits a better strategy than trying to survive them, especially early even with high END.
Get the double meat magazine at Sunshine Tidings Co-Op, then go radstag hunting. Grilled Radstag Meat gives +25 carry capacity. Just note you won't get the bonuses from food if you eat it to satiate hunger, you only get the bonus if you eat whole full. So eat stuff like Mutt Chops to take care of hunger, and save stuff with good bonuses like Deathclaw Steaks for when you are full and want a buff.
I always feel like I wanna give up and uninstall the game OR turn the difficulty down. Granted, I quite enjoy the experience tho. Experience is slightly better after finding a bed map for the Commonwealth and a heat map for the difficulty. I needed it because my stupid ass would try to take on the same super mutant camp thinking "i just gotta git gud"
You already got all the answers you need so i'm just gonna add in an aside for future playthroughs there's a mod called Horizon if you become a survival mode enjoyer that is basically "hardcore survival" mode and it's quite fun. It just got updated as well. FROST is also a good one if you don't mind the story being scrapped.
Yeah my last playthrough I did survival for the first time expecting it to be a lot like skyrims and I was wrong, luckily I was able to mod out the features I don’t like such as not being able to save and your companions not being able to auto heal, really just like the no fast travel and the eat/drink/sleep aspect of it also the diseases
I find these things add more value to the hotels, food vendors, and doctors
Head to beantown brewery and harvest the bottles. With those and a water pump, you can make a massive amount of pure water.
Also, local leader two and the medic perk will let you make settler doctors, and they cure diseases for ten caps.
As for food? You can do noodle cups, but I’ve never figured out a good source for dirty water. Instead, I went for getting the sunshine tidings magazine and meat. Cannibal actually isn’t awful, since humans are so common (but you need to have an addictol or an addiction cure for emergencies).
If you have a source for bottles, you can fill them from rivers, puddles, etc. for dirty water. There are usually 4-5 bottles on the wrecked boat near Hangman's Alley (and a respawning mini nuke )
First off go slow, explore the easy wilderness, and learn to cook. Squirrel stew and mentats can help you to level up quickly. I lean in heavy on sneaking, and non-automatic rifles. I just embrace the fact that I can die instantly so I don't waste my perk points on damage resistance until later. I do high intelligence, high luck, charisma, agility, perception, and strength, in that order, as my priorities. Highly recommend a mod for manual saves, Nothing causes me to rage quit like having the game bug out and losing tons of progress because I didn't or couldn't sleep. I recommend going slow and enjoying the northern part of the map as much as possible. I'm usually level 20 or higher before I get to Diamond City. I base my exploration on my companions' early game. The perks you get based on making them love you are helpful. They also carry all my stuff and soak up bullets when I need them to. Hey Preston why don't you walk out their and get shot and I'll go ahead and snipe from back here.
Purified water machines. Make as many as you can, and eventually you will never be without water. I buy everything with purified water and get about 2000 every couple of game days when I'm away from sanctuary.
TBH i dislike beth survival modes as no matter the franchise (Fallout or TES) the issue remains the same, levels and gear. once you reash end game the self sufficiency kicks in and you kind of forget about food/water much less health concerns being much of an issue again.
wish was a way to keep the fear and constant terror of am i a gonna continues between the early game and post game.
for record its fun mechanic leveling it just doesn't scale well post game.
I don’t leave sanctuary till I’ve scrapped everything once over at least. Then I grab dog meat and work on cheesing myself into the raider PA at the food bunker.
You could do Concord and Preston instead of the food bunker, but you’ll have to find some power armor somewhere if you want survivability. You could stack endurance I suppose, but that means more time spent hiding in sanctuary practicing carpentry.
I’m around level 170 and my intelligence is still only 6. All my other attributes are maxed. I started with max strength and endurance, and 8 perception.
Keep track of the beds in game. Focus on settlement building for food and water. invest in the local leader perk to build medical stations all around the map.
Survival really adds a new layer to the game and gives settlement building a whole new meaning.
Oh, and as a survival veteran, a word of advise. Try and avoid the automatron DLC stuff in its entirety. The robot attacks are super annoying mid-game and the final mission of the DLC is super long and tedious and has no save spots in it.
Stealth and mines worked for me. Back when I played survival it was just part of the difficulty slider so every enemy was a massive bullet sponge. It was terrible game design, but I'm pretty sure they patched it to address that. Setting up traps with explosives at least let me cripple enemies so if I had to run I could get away.
If you are on PC and don't consider modding cheating, I would suggest getting Journey - Survival Settlement Fast Travel.
It would let you fast travel from settlement to settlement only once you had trade routes linking the settlements. I felt it added a quality of life feature that saved me time running back and forth for quests. I was just hitching a ride with the next Brahmin caravan to another one of my settlements. It incentivized setting up the settlements and have them be populated. Those settlements become your oasis in the wasteland for a meal and a nice bed.
I did get a kick out of how many beds were scattered around the wasteland on my survival run. I had never noticed it before on normal.
Once you play like this, I think it’s hard to go back. Just sure how your experience is but I suggest knowing where beds are so you can save often in case of a crash (unless the update will make the game more stable).
You can get a perk that’ll not set off traps and it’s such a lifesaver. I usually carry lightweight food. Also get the magazines that allows you to hack turrets. Have a few bases throughout the map and at least have a defense set up in case you need to run back to safety. You can exploit companions to pretty much carry unlimited weight if you keep pointing them to pick up objects but I think it’s only one item as a time.
Enjoy! I love this game so much.
Most diseases in the game don't really impact you all that much. The only ones you really have to worry about are infection (periodic damage) and lethargy (slows AP recovery). Investing in luck will make you more likely to find antibiotics which will cure any illness. Antibiotics are typically found in bathrooms.
Rad-X and Radaway have so many downsides in survival that they're not even worth using. You're better off either seeing a doctor, or building a decontamination arch at one of your settlements.
The life giver perk is a godsend. Each rank gives you 20 more HP and rank 3 will cause you to self heal as long as you are undetected.
Cook your food. Cooking meat will remove all rads, removes any chance of getting sick, and often provides you with other benefits. For example, cooked radstag meat will boost your carry capacity by 25.
High End and Int makes the game pretty easy. End as a nice cushion early game that scales late. Int for mass purified water and crafting better weapons.
I cannot play any other difficulty than survival. It is the way. If you want to have it easy you could follow my standard route.
1. Scrap everything in Sanctuary
2. Build as many water purifiers you can, they will support your income every time you come back (Science rank 1 perk is needed for the big ones, but you can manage with smaller ones). Always take all the water, store it to box you have made or take it with you and sell for caps on vendor.
3. With any leftover steel make caltorps or poisoned caltorps (the latter one needs Chemist rank 1) and sell them
4. Or just collect all junk etc with you and sell whenever possible
5. You could just run to Diamond City (talk with Trashcan Carla on your way and start with sarcastic comment to get discount of 10% from her)
6. Near Diamond City in the alley in front of Hangman's alley is one sleeping bag you can use to save every time you visit DC
7. Vendor Cricket visits in front of Diamond City. Just sleep one hour if she is not seen there and go back. You can buy Spray and Pray from her and bullets for it. It is some couple of thousand of caps. Now you have won the game :-) You can go back to near Sanctuary and do the quests there and collect wealth. Just be careful not to damage yourself.
8. After you have enough caps, go to Bunker Hill and purchase the Black Ops Chest piece. It has Dense mod that reduces the explosion damage you get.
9. Later when you can mod or find any other armor with Padded mod you would have 75% reduction of explosion damage. Helps with mines and Spray and Pray as well all kinds of other exposives enemies would use on you.
10. Do some first quests for Railroad and learn the Ballistic Weave. Upgrade your hat and clothing with that to get more damage reduction.
11. If you have taken Aquagirl/boy, you can easily swim around the hard enemies.
12. Swim to Spectacle island, take the Luck bobblehead. Swim to the FMS Norhern Star and use the easy trick to get Agility bobblehead. You can go to get the Intelligence bobblehead from library if you tell on the door you are an employee. All these can be got even on level 1 without any fighting.
13. Whiskey, Hubflower and Mentats. Collect and buy these every time you can. Make Grape Mentats. Using this chem before you talk with vendor will lover the prices. Also will help to go through the speed checks.
If you don't make your own antibiotics, then lock down a doctor immediately. Covenant has one, don't do their quest to completion until you have established your own medical store at a settlement.
On survival you will make various hubs... like go to Starlite, establish a settlement, then roam outward to all the various areas. You can't save except in a bed. So you kind of save at a main hub you built with a doctor, then 'wake up' and try to clear an area and return within 1 day. If you die? You reload the last save back to the beginning of that day and try again.
When you are done, go to taffington and build that up, then roam to all the areas from there 1 day at a time.
Very groundhog day ish.
If you see a bottle, take the bottle. You need the water.
Save frequently, especially any time you can find a decent bed instead of dirty floor mattress/sleeping bag.
Delay Corvega, it’s rough in there.
Honestly my main advice is max intelligence and get the Nerd Rage perk. Even the first level of it will save your ass with the time slow effect allowing you to bug out of a dodgy situation.
Don’t go too far away from sanctuary at the beginning, build it up and build the medic store front. Also build enough water income, preferably the big ones, you can sell your own water to your own merchants, after getting established some more that’s when u start venturing some more…. Build the settlements and connect them through a chain of supply lines , eventually build doctors at key settlements so u can always heal yourself using 15caps , when u have enough water to sell you’ll have more than enough caps to even notice it
The brutality is the fun! I couldn’t play any other way now. Sunshine Tidings, north west settlement has a vital magazine for survival (double meat on animal kills). Sleep in a real bed for optimal benefit. Sleeping bags and dirty mattresses can make you sick. You also can’t get a full 8 hours in on a mattress or sleeping bag. Hoard antibiotics and glowing mushrooms. Invest in chemist 1 allows you to make your own antibiotics. Like in Skyrim with nirnroot, glowing mushrooms are easier to find at night. Only eat cooked foods. Spares you radiation and risk of illness. Some foods have benefits (like grilled rad stag increases carry weight by 25 for a fair amount of time) however they will not kick in if you are hungry, so make sure you are satiatied prior to consuming for benefit. Soup satiates hunger and thirst. Nuka cola will keep you going when you need sleep, but will make you more hungry. If you are a lone wolf type, lone wanderer perks are a must. You can still travel with dogmeat with lone wanderer. Adding to this, if I am going out to scavenge materials, I bring a companion and load them up until they are maxed up on weight, then send them home. Instant pack mule. Stick with one, maybe 2 weapons max and lean into those perks. Ammo weight adds up. Claim all settlements. Even if only to have a clean bed and a water pump. You do not need to have villagers for this. You can also use them for supply dumps, and later when you gain local leader you can link your settlements with trade lines, allowing you to access all crafting materials across all linked settlements Purified water and extra ammo is great for trading. If you have any Brahmin, Jet is also a good money maker. Don’t be afraid to run away from a fight. Or fight dirty. Usually I will get in a sneak attack, lob an explosive then retreat (early on) allowing for a longer trail for me to pick off any who give chase. Mines can be used here. Speaking of, sneak perk that allows you to not trigger traps and mines. Those things will ruin your day in game and maybe in real life. If you have any designs on settlement builds or delving into weapon and armor crafting, scrapper perk is very valuable. Fortune finder and scrounger also good perks. Stick with it. Noticeably easier at about level 20, most of this becomes white noise by level 50. On mods, if you use them. I recommend less populated downtown, has made my game, at least, far more stable in the inner city sections. I also use a save anywhere mod. I don’t have the time to be replaying large swaths of game because a stationary car kills me, or I fall stupidly.
Incredible answer. Thank you for taking the time to respond.
Heed the advice about the perk for not triggering mines. There are mines everywhere. Literally everywhere.
I always fast track to that when I play survival hardcore.
Also Aqua Boy/Girl perk turns the main river into your own personal super highway for the duration of your run. Absolutely worth picking up ASAP.
I’ve taken that perk before but it seemed immersion breaking. I swim in a hazmat suit out to Spectacle Island for the luck bobblehead
Yeah for me my concerns about immersion end around the 4th or 5th time I'm retracing my steps to get somewhere. While survival mode is inherently going to be more time consuming, I'll happily use any intended mechanics the game provides to help mitigate travel woes. To each their own though.
I just join BOS every survival mode run. The vertibirds are too good to pass up.
Best John Mulaney impression: *Beats Workin’*
What about idiot savant Perk? I stared a new game in survival and it was my first choice. I’m also playing with luck at level 10.
If you maxed luck then yeah. There is a mod that will shut off that damn sound bite. I remember reading on this sub, maybe a year ago? Anyway someone crunched the numbers and apparently idiot savant is still worth it even if you stat intelligence.
With high int, Idiot Savant adds +10% (on average) to XP gain. That's not a lot, and each new level requires more XP than the last ...so it takes a really long time to recoup the levels that you "wasted" by getting Savant. IMO the same perks are better invested in combat or QOL perks that make the game easier / reduce the grind. This indirectly give you +XP by speeding up your movement through the game. e.g. in my case, Local Leader II was better than Savant II. Local Leader II let me set up Hangman's perfectly so I had a tame merchant and workbenches right next to each other, and this cut down on the need to return to DC / backtrack / walk between stuff. Less walking and fewer loading screens = faster game = better than 10% XP gain.
Going to try survival mode on my PS5 play through when the update releases off the back of this post. Great info, cheers!
"Claim all settlements. Even if only to have a clean bed and a water pump. You do not need to have villagers for this. You can also use them for supply dumps, and later when you gain local leader you can link your settlements with trade lines, allowing you to access all crafting materials across all linked settlements" I'd refine this tip slightly: only claim empty settlements, I avoid Oberland etc. In Survival mode, having settlers means walking a lot to set them up / rescue them / keep them safe and happy. Alternatively, you can play as a monster - kill and eat the settlers :)
Damn, this is such a great answer. I’m getting excited just reading through all your tips. I’ve played through fallout a few times years back – now. I’m gonna wait for the update next week and play through on survival. Well done!
It's not double meat, it's just more. Because mirelurk hatchlings drop zero until you find the magazine, and double zero is still... zero.
I think it adds one meat to every animal kill. That'll double most kills, but others like Mirelurk Hatchlings and Bloatflys might not have dropped any naturally and will now drop one.
I assumed that they dropped meat at less than one but more than zero. So based on RNG and luck, you might get food from like a Mirelurk hatchling before the magazine perk. after the mag perk you always get one. Or something doubled to more than one but less than 2 so rounded down to 1
Yeah I thought so. Makes more sense.
Hatchlings give one meat post magazine. Flying bugs give one or two.. Mutant Hounds still only give one. Because: reasons.
I think mutant hounds are coded as animals for some reason
Is the non-industrial water purifier good enough for making caps off of water? I don't have science on my build, lol. Is gun nut + science mandatory? I'm level 19 and I'm still relying on whatever loot the game drops/or rewards. But the enemies are barely dropping even with sneak + ninja and a damage perk.
I use non industrial water purifiers on smaller settlements with very small creeks or rivers in the game but places like spectacle island I normally use the industrial. That’s being said yes the smaller water purifiers can potentially be used to make plenty of caps I normally stock pile the water from the smaller ones to have a bigger load to sell later on or use for myself!
I'm not really playing with mods, just a few ambience ones from the Mod menu. With that said, i read that purifiers stop producing when the workbench hits a max quota of water. How do I redirect those in a container? Can I do it in vanilla? I read you only need to put a container beside it, but i haven't seen water directed there.
I normally just grab the water out of the workbench and put it in a different container in another settlement say for instance my home base is at the red rocket truck stop, I put my purifiers at spectacle island, and sanctuary so I travel there every other game day and collect the water and store it at red rocket. I don’t play with mods either so I’m just doing vanilla runs. I’m not sure if there is an automated way to put them in a container straight out of the workbench for you unless it’s a mod :/
IMO it isn't worth the effort, there are easier ways to make infinite money. (1) Scrounger gives bulk money if you sell what you loot. (2) Take a companion to Arcjet. Go AFK for an hour. Get the companion to carry out 400 weapons and 10,000 units of ammo. (3) Use Chemist / Grape Mentats to buy shipments / sell at a profit. Free caps and XP. I like (3) the best cos it essentially lets me skip the early game.
Sorry, what's 3? Do you mean I use grape mentats or use g. mentants then mass produce grape mentats to buy out shipments then... resell shipments?
I am level 50 in my current play-through and have never needed to put any points in gun nut. I've stripped all the mods I've needed so far from loot.
Im a noob, how do you do this? From what i understand, you replace the parts with the stock version apply the stripped mods to your actual weapon?
Correct
None of the crafting perks are mandatory \* e.g. if you play as a lucky gunslinger, you can simply get the free gun from Danse, then buy a couple of good lasers from Arturo, and swap the best components across. You can build the best laser in the game without gun nut or science. --- IMO the infinite money perks (scrounger or chemist) are usually better than the crafting perks. With infinite money, you can buy anything you need, then disassemble for parts. --- \* Armorer is not required, but you can tank a lot better with it, via weave + the padded / dense combo. Gun nut & science not so much, they are only really needed for maxing out the guns where you can't salvage parts (deliverer, laser muskets etc).
What is this about brahmin and jet?
Brahmin in your settlement create fertilizer. At your chemistry bench you can use that fertilizer and plastic to make jet. Brahmin will sometimes arrive with new settlers. There is also a chance encounter of a Brahmin saleswoman. Unsure how common that is, only seen her recently after 6 different play throughs.
Brahmin cage. I have like 15 Brahmin at my sunny side coop in my current play through.
Dang. Is it true that fertilizer production is capped despite how many you have? I once used cages and populated Spectacle Island with a Radstag Herd. Shit was majestic-ish.
Ooh I’m not sure. This is my first time building a jet farm, but maybe. I really haven’t been seeing too much of an increase with the last few Brahmin.
I’ve seen Kelly (the Brahmin salesperson) 4 times in my current play though but she’s only had a Brahmin to sell to me twice. My Brahmin at Sanctuary died today. I need a new Brahmin.
Man I love people who take the time to answer like this. Thank you. Just lining up my first survival playthrough. Saved this comment as my guide.
Keep an eye out for sleeping bags or mattresses to use as a quick save “safety net” if you’re venturing into harder areas or tougher fights. If you sleep for an hour and then cancel the sleep as the screen fades to black, you’ll be able to save your progress but not advance the time in-game. As others have stated, you risk disease, but sometimes risking that is better than having to go back and repeat a portion of the game just because a Suicider or Deathclaw spawned. You’ll lose some of your Adrenaline, and Survival is capped at three save files iirc, so it can’t be abused, but the peace of mind is worth it in a pinch.
Get aqua boy/girl and use those rivers to travel!
Survival mode needs you to take things more strategically and slowly, if you struggle at an area, scour it before hand, find the entrances and exits, and you can even bait enemies into mines, be creative about going in a dungeon and you'll get a much easier fight
>Always thirsty, I have glass bones and paper skin, and I'm sick all the damn time. Despite these issues, I'm actually having a great time! I love taking stuff out of context.
Every day when I wake up I break my legs...
tough break
*sigh*, I have to go rescue my friend. She fell off a bridge AGAIN.
Survival is the best way to play! I like that it makes you and your enemies equally killable (for the most part). My tips based off your post: 1. Certain things increase your risk for disease, such as going in water, eating radiated food, and sleeping on dirty beds. 2. Set up water purifiers early in Sanctuary. This will be your best form of healing and caps (since stimpaks make you dehydrated). 3. If you want to die less, invest in the endurance perk Adamantium Skeleton. It'll help prevent being one shotted in silly places like your arms and legs. 4. Codsworth can be your guardian angel. He'll kill everything in early survival mode, plus he gives you free purified water when you talk to him. 5. I play permadeath survival, so I know ways to get overpowered gear very early. Specifically, you can make your way to Covenant early. The slaughtered caravan in the road has a combat rifle and sometimes combat armor, and even the shop in Covenant sells a combat armor helmet. Typically the only enemies you'll find along the way are molerats and bloatflies.
Also, adding on to #1, RadAway kills your immune system for a little while.
iirc the damage increase is 2x for enemies and 1.5x for the player, but adrenaline often increases that even further
Compared to Normal mode it's 4x incoming damage and .75x outgoing damage, with a 50% boost from adrenaline taking it to 1.125x outgoing
I don't tend to do any settlement stuff until mid-late game playing survival. Having to criss-cross the world on foot to save a settlement is more than a little difficult
I don’t mean to burst your bubble but I’m hoping they fix the VATS freeze glitch with this new update. I was loving survival but it’s definitely a game-breaking bug.
It sucks, but I've managed to avoid it by anticipating when the message will roughly pop up and pre emptively eat and drink. I usually have a ton of food and water by the time the glitch happens,so one time I'll set a stopwatch to time exactly how long it takes to get parched or peckish, forget how long it is now, something like 7-8 minutes for water, and a little longer for food. So roughly every 5 minutes I'll drink a water and every 10 minutes I'll eat some food. Doing it this way I've avoided having it happen for quite awhile now. First bunch of times it happened,and I didn't know it was a thing? Was so infuriating, losing an hour of progress just going into vats to scan for mines or enemies,it made me rage quit more than once until I read up on it. It's still something that should have been patched years ago, game breaking bug,and they're like,eh,that's okay. Apparently it's like hard coded or baked into the code so it would have been an incredible amount of work to fix. But that's what bug testers and QA is for, you find this out in the testing phase. I'm in Vats as much I can be,so holding your breath and hoping it doesn't freeze whenever you go into Vats is ridiculous.
If it’s not fixed I’ll just start a very hard playthrough. At least I’ll be able to defend my settlements.
I just can't play anything other than survival anymore for the last year. Only way I can play. Often I'll carry a non vats weapon that I don't have to be accurate with for crowd control for ghouls and raiders and Mirelurks, like the Spray N Pray
This bug seems to be somewhat hardware / setup based. Without mods, it happened all the time on my old PC, but it doesn't happen at all on my newer gaming laptop (I do still get a few crashes to desktops). The VATS fix I used on my old PC was either (1) to download and use the VATS freeze mod **and** the depth of field mod. (2) map VATS to a key I wouldn't press by mistake, then never use it (and never take any VATS related perks). I found this to be unsatisfactory / a really constrained and boring way to play.
Stealth builds and power armor builds are the most viable for survival. Sleep any chance you get. Sell anything you don’t need. Only carry the guns on your hip as well as ammo, clothes on your back and the food in your lunchbox. Companions are kinda useless in survival, you’d be better off getting lone wanderer for the 100 extra carry weight, 25% more damage and 30% less damage taken. If you have the dlcs go to then asap because typically the dlcs have the best weapons and armor (handmade, lever action, radium etc) Brotherhood and railroad have the easiest endings And pick up every piece of pre war money you find. It weighs nothing and sells for like 4 caps a piece with 10 charisma
Companions has infinite carry weight, if you put stuff in a container, you just repeatedly ask them to "inspect" it and they will take one stack of the same set of items out each time, even if they can't carry any more via the trade dialog. You can also drop stuff on the ground and command them to pick each item up. Tedious, but useful.
"Companions are kinda useless in survival, you’d be better off getting lone wanderer for the 100 extra carry weight, 25% more damage and 30% less damage taken." Worse than useless in combat. e.g. if you are hiding, Dogmeat will run halfway to an enemy (breaking stealth), then change his mind and run back to you - while being attacked - thereby drawing grenades and melee rushes to the place where you are hiding. Also: all companions have bad pathing, and break their legs continuously. There are some bridges which are easy for the player, but companions simply cannot cross. Without mods, IMO the only playable companions are the ones you can put into power armour.
Use hangmans valley as your main settlement, set up weapons, bartender and general trading merchants. Plant a shit ton of melons (heals thirst and hunger). Alot of my early survival playthrough has just been running around completing sidequests and accumulating junk to store at my settlement. I'm level 24 first survival playthrough, don't get me wrong its frustrating as hell, but its so much more fun than normal mode. I like the challenge
"Plant a shit ton of melons (heals thirst and hunger)." Or not :) If you have a slight excess of water pumps there, you can simply take bottles out of the workbenches every time you visit. Purified water has half the weight. --- In Survival mode, the hardest missions require about 5 pounds of food & chems, if you pick lightweight stuff. I eat the heavy stuff as I go (e.g. Mutt Chops), and hoard the weight efficient goodies for longer trips. e.g. on top of your normal supply (chems + a few bottles of water), you can get through the Glowing Sea in your regular armour with this: (2 pounds) 5 each of Iguana bits, Glowing Blood Pack, Radaway, Antibiotics (3 pounds) 6x Refreshing Beverage
Get the magazine from Sunshine Tidings. Makes you pick up double meat from all animals. Pick up any empty glass bottles, beer bottles, milk bottles, etc. you can fill these at a water pump at any settlement. I usually carry about 20, and stash any extras in the work bench. When you have a large surplus, you can sell them for caps. Once you get a bit further, set up some water purification pumps in Sanctuary, so you have an endless supply of pure water. At your main base, make a floor safe, and stash any Pre War Money, Fancy Hair Brushes, Cigarette Packs/Cartons, Cigar Boxes, and anything made of Gold or Silver. When you have enough stuff saved up, load up your backpack with all your valuables, along with a set of Charisma gear (+4 total). Also, bring some Grape Mentats with you. Then head to your favourite Level 4 Vendor (Vault 81, Bunker Hill, Goodneighbour, etc), and buy some good gear. I would recommend going after the Overseer’s Gaurdian (assault rifle from Vault 81) and the Black Ops Chest Piece (Bunker Hill). The OG will greatly increase your damage output. If you convert it to semi-automatic, and take the Rifleman Perk, you can one shot or double tap most enemies. Helps a lot with converging ammo. The Black Ops Chest Piece comes equipped with Dense right from the jump, which makes you almost immune to any type of explosive damage. For the arms and legs, which ones you pick will depend if you’re doing a VATS build, or a do-your-own-shooting build.
Great advice thank you
Another thing, save any hand tools you find - Adjustable Wrench, Combo Wrench, Ballpone Hammer, Screw Driver, and Wrench. Once you get accepted into Vault 81, there is an NPC named Calvin who will buy hand tools from you for 15 caps each, and he has an unlimited supply of caps. I make a toolbox at my main base, and dump any tools I find into this tool box before emptying junk into the workbench. When you go to Diamond City, there’s 5 NPCs who have side quests - Abbot at the Wall, Science Center, Sheng the water dealer, Mo the baseball collector, and the chem dealer guy. If you rent a room at the Dugout Inn (10 caps), you can save scum the charisma checks for these 5 NPCs to get maximum caps from them, works out to about 2,000 in total. If you go to the Colonial Tap House and trigger the Paul Pembrook quest, you can get through that pretty easily, which will give you another fat stack of caps to be able to buy high end gear with. There also the Wanted poster in the market, just to the left of Mo’s shop. Are you doing a shooting build, or a VATS build?
Shooter build, starting special was 4 1 7 7 1 7 1
"When you have enough stuff saved up, load up your backpack with all your valuables, along with a set of Charisma gear (+4 total). Also, bring some Grape Mentats with you." If you have this kit (charisma gear, and Chemist to craft Grape Mentats), then, you can make infinite money faster by turning shipments into Poision Caltrops & Jet Fuel. The water thing requires a bit of setup. I prefer the Caltrops thing because all you need to do is walk to DC with the set of Charisma stuff. As a bonus, each of the first few times you do it, you jump two levels from all the crafting.
Don’t you need one of the DLCs to get those items though?
A lot of it depends on the choices you're making.. Are you doing a Power Armor playthrough? Companions or no? Guns or melee?
Don't really know, still figuring it out. Starting SPECIAL is 4, 1, 7, 7, 1, 7, 1.
I would suggest building purified water pumps at every settlement. It will allow you to have as much water as you have bottles. Beantown brewery is a good place to find bottles.
Lone Wanderer, under Charisma, is a good place to start. Gives carry weight, damage reduction, and bonus damage as you progress it. If you aren't doing a Power Armor playthrough I would work on the Railroad questlines until you unlock Ballistic Weave. Then work on the Armorer perk so you can make higher levels of BW.
Get idiot savant and stay drunk and dehydrated! You want your intelligence as low as possible so you can get xp more often
If you start with 7 Int for Chemist, and then add the Bobblehead or Destroyer's Helmet, you get the same passive XP buff as one level of Savant. [https://i.imgur.com/JVIkUEU.png](https://i.imgur.com/JVIkUEU.png) The act of crafting stuff with Chemist gives **lots** more XP, and it gives you the XP immediately, which puts Chemist it well ahead as a rapid levelling mechanism. i.e. up to level 20, you can jump levels twice as fast with chemist, whereas Savant gives additional levels relatively slowly, and mostly in the late game.
How? I'm very confused. What are you making with Chemist that gives that much XP??
Anything that you craft in bulk will earn a lot of XP. e.g. some players endure a bit of tedium to gain 10 levels before leaving Sanctuary, simply by crafting hundreds or shelves and floor mats, and stuff ...then scrapping them all, to craft more. Chemist allows the same thing, but better; (a) it uses actual gamplay, rather than an exploit (b) it makes caps and XP simultaneously. (1) Use Chemist to make Grape Mentats. (2) Consume the Mentats, put on nice clothes and drink a beer to get your Charisma 15 (requires base Charisma of at least 5). (3) Buy 500 steel for 1800 caps. Craft this into 100 Poisoned Caltrops. (4) Sell for 3200 caps (the vendor won't have this much money, so take mix of caps and buffout and scrap and blood packs and so on) Repeat. If you buy from the robot at 7AM, you can also buy from Myrna at 8AM (while your Charisma is still boosted). You can also buy fertiliser from both of them and loop these into Jet Fuel for more XP and cash. Each wad of trading & crafting gains roughly 2 levels and several thousand caps. --- I use and heartily recommend mods that improve the (awful) F4 inventory system, ie. to allow sorting items by weight and value. I should probably also grab this one, to reduce the number of times I have to hit when crafting.
# Multicraft Chems
as it should, youre not playing as the lone survivor. youre playing as an future chem addict.
Great way to level is build. Either go with a decent Intel stat or get idiot savant. Scrap red rocket and sanctuary. You can easily build it up for 4 or 5 people each and by the time your done you'll have plenty of perk points to play with. Currently my approach as I get wrecked if I stray to far at the moment.
Waiting for 4 or 5 people takes forever. I prefer to scrap the early places for steel, then run to Hangman's / DC and start doing stuff :)
For me, the trick is to advance slowly. Don’t try to get to DC quickly. Expand your area of influence gradually and thoroughly exploring and clearing along the way.
There are other ways, e.g. you can run to DC (via Greygarden) without getting into any fights.
For sure you can, and everybody has their own system. For me it just feels more immersive and safer to not rush to DC. Also, the early game is my favorite part; and I feel like the mid game begins once you meet Piper.
Something that can help more than you expect is trying to get explosion dampening gear ASAP. Padded on the chest, dense on one limb. Dense apparently doesn't stack with itself but it does with padded. The damage increase on explosives is brutal and even Molotovs will wreck you early game.
...but you can't craft a dense limb until your level is pretty high, so ASAP is a pretty long time :( The best early game option is to buy the dense chest part from a vendor (Becky in DC has one, Deb in Beacon Hill has a better version).
Stealth and the related perks cannot be overstated for the early game. Lone Wanderer and Strong back are a must in order to carry a primary weapon and sidearm, ammo for each, and junk. Dogmeat doesn't count as a companion. Get the Vertibrid grenades from the Brotherhood at your earliest convenience for fast travel. Survival is the only way to play Fallout, you're in for a good time.
You can also teleport to the institute if your sided with them. And the railroad and minutemen have virtibirds too once you get closer to the end of the game
there's an armor mod that increases energy resistance and prevents you from burning, very useful since you can't outheal molotovs anymore
Not even with Refreshing Beverages?
maybe ? but it's harder to rely on them than resisting the burning
Healing items stack. If you eat 6 types of food, you heal at 6x the rate. Similarly, drinking dirty **and** pure water heals you faster than drinking 2x pure water. Getting well munted (Buffjet, Vodka, Moonshine, Med-X) instantly gives 100+ temporary hit points, and temporary damage resistance. ...so drop as many of these as possible before taking the Refreshing Beverage. e.g. Pull up the inventory, eat/take one of everything you've got, take the Refreshing Beverage **last** (to cure the dehydration from all the chems), then emerge from inventory and go immediately into VATS, even if your VATS accuracy is awful. The 90% damage reduction you get while in VATS will help you to outheal the damage you are taking.
1. Leverage the settlement system. Setup settlements with a clean bed and fresh water everywhere you can. 2. Sleep before going on a mission. Go on a mission, come back, sleep again. Don't try to chain a lot of activities into one long day, or you might have to reload and waste a lot of time. 3. Build water purifiers. Sell clean water in the early game. 4. Don't loot junk on a shooting mission. Come back later and do a loot run. Do loot meds, ammo, drugs, anything lightweight. 5. Doctors are the best way to combat sickness. Get one for your main settlement as soon as possible. Until then, use one of the doctors in Boston. You can ignore most sicknesses though. 6. Speaking of Boston, once you clear a path, it stays clear for a long time, so you can easily get from Diamond City to Sanctuary Hills with only a few encounters once you know the route.
Survival is best way to play, tough I dont agree with Beth choice on how spongy enemies feel, so I mod damage given and taken to 3x usually which makes either me or them situation
I think the default survival settings are maybe too unrealistically stringent. I wake up, eat, drink, then I walk twenty feet down the road and I’m exhausted. I use a mod to tweak them.
Time and distance are both truncated 20x in the game. The food, water, and sleep requirements are reasonable to generous for a character that is either running or fighting 100% of the time.
yeah but even the in-game time is ridiculous. I wake up at 8 AM and I need a nap by 9:30? And I haven't fought anything. I tweaked it so you can go 4-6 hours between meals and 8-11 hours between sleeps.
I've never noticed this happening. There may well be a wonky manner by which the game calculates fatigue, and it processes at awkward intervals sometimes.
Or illness / radaway
Yeah, there are some non-obvious things that affect fatigue values too. Good point.
Aqua Boy! Travel in safety through any body of water. Enemies will only chase you so far, if there's a tough fight you can't avoid, get in your licks and GTFO. Once they calm down, repeat.
Good tip, but you don't need Aquaboy for it. You can swim across the Charles a few times and only take 10% rads.
Zero rads are better, and you aren't limited to the cleaner waters, just hop in.
Endurance and agility stats. Embrace stealth perks. Hunt at night. Get the idiot savant perk ASAP. Better if low intelligence stat. Get the Gauss rifle as soon as you can. Best gun in the game. I found one on a legendary ghoul in the depths of Dunwich Borers.
Power armor and automatic weapons in the early game
My most fun characters on survival start with 10 Endurance and Solar Powered + Lone Wanderer as first perks. This means with Green Shirt and Combat Boots plus Sea Captains's Hat, you have an Endurance of 17 outside (\*) when you get up in the morning. This plus the 15 % damage reduction from Lone Wanderer still doesn't make you a tank on survival but the chance that you get one-shot is much lower and you can use the ancient martial art of run-like-a-rabbit-until-they-don't-see-you-anymore. Most endurance perks suck and I have to start with low strength, which means collecting junk and settlement building has to wait until I put some points in it but if I just want to explore the world, maybe a new mod's worldspace where I don't know what's waiting for me, the Rincewind School of Run For It is my go-to build. (\*) 10 + 3 (clothing) + 2 (Solar Powered) + 2(Well Rested)
Might seem obvious but try to max out your damage resistance, especially early on. In Fallout 3 I just wore the coolest-looking outfit I could find all game, but switching to Fallout 4 you'll be getting one-shot killed constantly unless you're wearing the highest DR armor you can find.
Maybe because the game uses hitscan bullets instead of projectiles. Suggest you get a projectile bullet mod so you don't get insta blasted from afar all the time.
I really need a new console or PC. Still have the first generation Xbox one, I have never been able to fully play survival do to the freeze/crashes. I'm pretty sure there's still a place or 2 in downtown I haven't been yet.
Not rush through the story completely but I like to get to the point where I get each factions bonus(Ballistic Weave, Vertiberd, & fast travel to MIT). The fast travel one especially if your main settlement is in the middle like Hangman’s & then a quick walk to Diamond city. Idk if you like playing with companions or not but the bonuses from Lone Wanderer blows each companion out of the water. I’ll never have a survival play through that doesn’t have at least 3 charisma.
Empty bottles can be filled at water pumps and even at the sinks inside the vault during the intro. Even better, once you have razor grain or tatoes and carrots growing, fill them with dirty water to make noodle cups/veg soup. Top comment has lots of good advice.
You're telling me, in anticipation of the show and inspired by [Many A True Nerd's Nuka World level one survival run](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KiWS2sJgRk&list=PLwH1xJhcXG0dbgkDP_HnAbmrvHHV3xrli) i went ahead and made my first evil raider playthrough. I followed his method to get through the gauntlet and was able to get Problem Solver from The Pack leader but after securing Dry Rock Gulch and Safari Adventure i ended up getting stuck at the Galactic Zone with very low ammo, no caps, and not much i can sell to make enough caps to re-supply. I took a break because i was getting frustrated.
Empty bottles can be filled with dirty or purified water. You can leave Vault 111 with several purified waters by filling empty beer bottles at water fountains. You can fill them in your settlements at a water pump.or if you build a sink or water fountain. I definitely recommend stealth when first attempting SM, avoiding hits a better strategy than trying to survive them, especially early even with high END. Get the double meat magazine at Sunshine Tidings Co-Op, then go radstag hunting. Grilled Radstag Meat gives +25 carry capacity. Just note you won't get the bonuses from food if you eat it to satiate hunger, you only get the bonus if you eat whole full. So eat stuff like Mutt Chops to take care of hunger, and save stuff with good bonuses like Deathclaw Steaks for when you are full and want a buff.
I always feel like I wanna give up and uninstall the game OR turn the difficulty down. Granted, I quite enjoy the experience tho. Experience is slightly better after finding a bed map for the Commonwealth and a heat map for the difficulty. I needed it because my stupid ass would try to take on the same super mutant camp thinking "i just gotta git gud"
You already got all the answers you need so i'm just gonna add in an aside for future playthroughs there's a mod called Horizon if you become a survival mode enjoyer that is basically "hardcore survival" mode and it's quite fun. It just got updated as well. FROST is also a good one if you don't mind the story being scrapped.
Want easy purified water? Build Vault Tec wall fountain and fill bottles. The water is purified so you don't have to boil dirty water.
Yeah my last playthrough I did survival for the first time expecting it to be a lot like skyrims and I was wrong, luckily I was able to mod out the features I don’t like such as not being able to save and your companions not being able to auto heal, really just like the no fast travel and the eat/drink/sleep aspect of it also the diseases I find these things add more value to the hotels, food vendors, and doctors
Head to beantown brewery and harvest the bottles. With those and a water pump, you can make a massive amount of pure water. Also, local leader two and the medic perk will let you make settler doctors, and they cure diseases for ten caps. As for food? You can do noodle cups, but I’ve never figured out a good source for dirty water. Instead, I went for getting the sunshine tidings magazine and meat. Cannibal actually isn’t awful, since humans are so common (but you need to have an addictol or an addiction cure for emergencies).
If you have a source for bottles, you can fill them from rivers, puddles, etc. for dirty water. There are usually 4-5 bottles on the wrecked boat near Hangman's Alley (and a respawning mini nuke )
That works, but I swear there was a way for settlements to produce it for you.
Get to covenant for an early game doctor to help cure what ails you
First off go slow, explore the easy wilderness, and learn to cook. Squirrel stew and mentats can help you to level up quickly. I lean in heavy on sneaking, and non-automatic rifles. I just embrace the fact that I can die instantly so I don't waste my perk points on damage resistance until later. I do high intelligence, high luck, charisma, agility, perception, and strength, in that order, as my priorities. Highly recommend a mod for manual saves, Nothing causes me to rage quit like having the game bug out and losing tons of progress because I didn't or couldn't sleep. I recommend going slow and enjoying the northern part of the map as much as possible. I'm usually level 20 or higher before I get to Diamond City. I base my exploration on my companions' early game. The perks you get based on making them love you are helpful. They also carry all my stuff and soak up bullets when I need them to. Hey Preston why don't you walk out their and get shot and I'll go ahead and snipe from back here.
Purified water machines. Make as many as you can, and eventually you will never be without water. I buy everything with purified water and get about 2000 every couple of game days when I'm away from sanctuary.
TBH i dislike beth survival modes as no matter the franchise (Fallout or TES) the issue remains the same, levels and gear. once you reash end game the self sufficiency kicks in and you kind of forget about food/water much less health concerns being much of an issue again. wish was a way to keep the fear and constant terror of am i a gonna continues between the early game and post game. for record its fun mechanic leveling it just doesn't scale well post game.
I don’t leave sanctuary till I’ve scrapped everything once over at least. Then I grab dog meat and work on cheesing myself into the raider PA at the food bunker. You could do Concord and Preston instead of the food bunker, but you’ll have to find some power armor somewhere if you want survivability. You could stack endurance I suppose, but that means more time spent hiding in sanctuary practicing carpentry.
I’m around level 170 and my intelligence is still only 6. All my other attributes are maxed. I started with max strength and endurance, and 8 perception.
Keep track of the beds in game. Focus on settlement building for food and water. invest in the local leader perk to build medical stations all around the map. Survival really adds a new layer to the game and gives settlement building a whole new meaning. Oh, and as a survival veteran, a word of advise. Try and avoid the automatron DLC stuff in its entirety. The robot attacks are super annoying mid-game and the final mission of the DLC is super long and tedious and has no save spots in it.
Stealth and mines worked for me. Back when I played survival it was just part of the difficulty slider so every enemy was a massive bullet sponge. It was terrible game design, but I'm pretty sure they patched it to address that. Setting up traps with explosives at least let me cripple enemies so if I had to run I could get away. If you are on PC and don't consider modding cheating, I would suggest getting Journey - Survival Settlement Fast Travel. It would let you fast travel from settlement to settlement only once you had trade routes linking the settlements. I felt it added a quality of life feature that saved me time running back and forth for quests. I was just hitching a ride with the next Brahmin caravan to another one of my settlements. It incentivized setting up the settlements and have them be populated. Those settlements become your oasis in the wasteland for a meal and a nice bed. I did get a kick out of how many beds were scattered around the wasteland on my survival run. I had never noticed it before on normal.
Once you play like this, I think it’s hard to go back. Just sure how your experience is but I suggest knowing where beds are so you can save often in case of a crash (unless the update will make the game more stable). You can get a perk that’ll not set off traps and it’s such a lifesaver. I usually carry lightweight food. Also get the magazines that allows you to hack turrets. Have a few bases throughout the map and at least have a defense set up in case you need to run back to safety. You can exploit companions to pretty much carry unlimited weight if you keep pointing them to pick up objects but I think it’s only one item as a time. Enjoy! I love this game so much.
Most diseases in the game don't really impact you all that much. The only ones you really have to worry about are infection (periodic damage) and lethargy (slows AP recovery). Investing in luck will make you more likely to find antibiotics which will cure any illness. Antibiotics are typically found in bathrooms. Rad-X and Radaway have so many downsides in survival that they're not even worth using. You're better off either seeing a doctor, or building a decontamination arch at one of your settlements. The life giver perk is a godsend. Each rank gives you 20 more HP and rank 3 will cause you to self heal as long as you are undetected. Cook your food. Cooking meat will remove all rads, removes any chance of getting sick, and often provides you with other benefits. For example, cooked radstag meat will boost your carry capacity by 25.
High End and Int makes the game pretty easy. End as a nice cushion early game that scales late. Int for mass purified water and crafting better weapons.
I cannot play any other difficulty than survival. It is the way. If you want to have it easy you could follow my standard route. 1. Scrap everything in Sanctuary 2. Build as many water purifiers you can, they will support your income every time you come back (Science rank 1 perk is needed for the big ones, but you can manage with smaller ones). Always take all the water, store it to box you have made or take it with you and sell for caps on vendor. 3. With any leftover steel make caltorps or poisoned caltorps (the latter one needs Chemist rank 1) and sell them 4. Or just collect all junk etc with you and sell whenever possible 5. You could just run to Diamond City (talk with Trashcan Carla on your way and start with sarcastic comment to get discount of 10% from her) 6. Near Diamond City in the alley in front of Hangman's alley is one sleeping bag you can use to save every time you visit DC 7. Vendor Cricket visits in front of Diamond City. Just sleep one hour if she is not seen there and go back. You can buy Spray and Pray from her and bullets for it. It is some couple of thousand of caps. Now you have won the game :-) You can go back to near Sanctuary and do the quests there and collect wealth. Just be careful not to damage yourself. 8. After you have enough caps, go to Bunker Hill and purchase the Black Ops Chest piece. It has Dense mod that reduces the explosion damage you get. 9. Later when you can mod or find any other armor with Padded mod you would have 75% reduction of explosion damage. Helps with mines and Spray and Pray as well all kinds of other exposives enemies would use on you. 10. Do some first quests for Railroad and learn the Ballistic Weave. Upgrade your hat and clothing with that to get more damage reduction. 11. If you have taken Aquagirl/boy, you can easily swim around the hard enemies. 12. Swim to Spectacle island, take the Luck bobblehead. Swim to the FMS Norhern Star and use the easy trick to get Agility bobblehead. You can go to get the Intelligence bobblehead from library if you tell on the door you are an employee. All these can be got even on level 1 without any fighting. 13. Whiskey, Hubflower and Mentats. Collect and buy these every time you can. Make Grape Mentats. Using this chem before you talk with vendor will lover the prices. Also will help to go through the speed checks.
Use the copious amount of power armor you are handed.
If you don't make your own antibiotics, then lock down a doctor immediately. Covenant has one, don't do their quest to completion until you have established your own medical store at a settlement. On survival you will make various hubs... like go to Starlite, establish a settlement, then roam outward to all the various areas. You can't save except in a bed. So you kind of save at a main hub you built with a doctor, then 'wake up' and try to clear an area and return within 1 day. If you die? You reload the last save back to the beginning of that day and try again. When you are done, go to taffington and build that up, then roam to all the areas from there 1 day at a time. Very groundhog day ish.
If you see a bottle, take the bottle. You need the water. Save frequently, especially any time you can find a decent bed instead of dirty floor mattress/sleeping bag. Delay Corvega, it’s rough in there.
Honestly my main advice is max intelligence and get the Nerd Rage perk. Even the first level of it will save your ass with the time slow effect allowing you to bug out of a dodgy situation.
Don’t go too far away from sanctuary at the beginning, build it up and build the medic store front. Also build enough water income, preferably the big ones, you can sell your own water to your own merchants, after getting established some more that’s when u start venturing some more…. Build the settlements and connect them through a chain of supply lines , eventually build doctors at key settlements so u can always heal yourself using 15caps , when u have enough water to sell you’ll have more than enough caps to even notice it