#fallout tips

Prepare to die: In the early game, you’ll go down after about 5 seconds of enemy fire, maybe a little more if you’ve gone deep into Endurance. But even in the late game, if you get caught out, you will die. Don’t worry -- you’ll get used to it

Positioning: On that note, the main way to avoid death is to be aware of your surroundings. Sounds obvious, but I never even knew about the cover mechanics until I started playing survival. Survival is best played after enough experience that you know, or can deduce, enemy layouts

VATS is your friend: Now, I’m going to generally avoid giving playstyle tips. There are styles I think are better or worse at survival mode, but ultimately, play how you want. So I know there are people who don’t like using VATS. But beyond giving you better DPS, VATS also increases your defense for its duration. It’s not a ton, but if you have to get in a straight up firefight with someone, it might make the difference

Enemies die quickly too: remember, survival isn’t just about turning the difficulty up past ‘very hard’. It’s got an entirely different ruleset, and you’re as deadly to enemies as they are to you. This means it’s more effective to take potshots at them or lob explosives in their general direction instead of lining up that perfect shot

Ammo weight varies massively: And I’m not just talking about the fact that missiles are now 7 weight each. Even among small guns, the weight difference can be impressive: You can only get 10 shotgun rounds to 1 weight as opposed to, say, ~70 .38 rounds. Obviously, those play different roles in your arsenal, but take this into account when deciding which guns to use.

Set up a base: Most players do this already, but it’s important to get something up quickly. Even if you don’t do minutemen stuff, find a settlement: settlers can produce food for you, and excess water supply turns into purified water you can carry with you.

Get used to making “trips”: No matter how much food & water you can carry, you’ll need to return to your base or some other safe spot eventually. Radiation, tiredness (delayed, but not reverted by caffeine), and scavenge capacity will force you back. Remember you’re going to have to walk all the way back too, since there’s no fast travel. Don’t go as far as you possibly can before running out of supplies, since several survival penalties can affect carry weight.

You live in Hangman’s Alley now: This might seem overly specific, but if you don’t believe me, check a map: there is no settlement even close to as convenient as Hangman’s Alley. You’re in the center of the map, right by a bridge across the river, and literally neighbors with Diamond City. If you feel like investing in local leader, you can make it a fully functional base, but even without that it has a cooking station and weapons station, which is enough to get by.

You don’t need as much as you think you do: If you’re like me, you probably get anxious if your ammo count dips below 200 on a given weapon. One you find a reliable base, make sure you only carry as much as you need for a given trip. I prefer 8-12 purified water, about 5-6 meals, and between 100-200 ammo, though for weapons like sniper rifles, that can be as little as 50. You also don’t need to be carrying around more than 3-5 stimpaks, rad-x, and rad-away: all have such tremendous downsides you couldn’t afford to use more than that without recuperating anyway

Glowing blood packs are your new best friend: Stimpaks basically have to be paired with a bottle of water to offset their downsides, cutting in to your water supplies for dealing with thirst, and meaning you can’t typically use them until you’re mostly dead if you want to be efficient. Crafting them is also locked away behind medic 1, not that you’ll find them in short supply. By comparison, glowing blood packs give nearly as much rad resist as rad-x, better %healing (not counting ranks in medic) than stimpaks, and no negative side effects. They even weigh the same as a stimpak! They won’t be easy to make in spades, but once you’re finding glowing radroaches & the like, keep a look out for the crafting reagents.

Caps are more important: I’m sure no one out there makes a habit of eschewing money, but because you have limited carrying capacity, you’ll often have less to sell, and you’ll need to buy more crafting components instead of scavenging them. Consider fortune finder, cap collector, and never shop without a full complement of charisma boosting gear (’sharp’ legendary gear is more slot efficient than clothing for charisma, so you might end up with a whole shopping outfit tucked away!)

Food can restore hunger OR health, but water restores thirst AND health: Minor note, but keep it in mind. Also, when you’re hungry, you won’t receive any auxiliary benefits from eating food. Don’t chow down on that queen mirelurk steak until you’re sated first!

The double-meat magazine is in Sunshine Tidings Co-op: Get this right away. A lot of dishes require 2 of a given meat, so now every kill of a given creature is a meal. It also guarantees bloodbug meat drops from bloodbugs, which is usually rare. And that’s important because:

You’ll want to live off of mirelurk and bloodbug meat: The way it works, you normally have to eat 1 weight worth of food to improve a level of hunger. It’ll take two mutt chops (weight: 0.5 each) to go from peckish to properly fed, but only one deathclaw steak (weight: 1 each). The exceptions are roasted mirelurk and bloodbug steaks, which only weight 0.5, but each one will improve your hunger. This means you can carry double the food supply you could otherwise.

Either invest in companions fully, or don’t bother: companions are just as flimsy as you are, require stimpaks to get back up once knocked down, have reduced carrying capacity, and as always can’t be relied upon to position themselves or not blunder directly into traps, your line of fire, etc. In addition, the Lone Wanderer perk gives you a pretty much essential +100 carrying capacity, so without it you’re going to have to offload more on them and have to trade it back as needed (plus their limited capacity will need to be partially taken up with armor). I’m not saying you can’t use companions, but don’t expect to unthinkingly wander around with one without having to care for them particularly.

Deep Pocketed vs Ultra-Light: For most armors, you get net more carrying capacity by applying ‘deep pocketed’ as your mod. But some armors (mostly DLC armors, I believe) get ludicrously lighter with the ultra-light mod. Even then, the net carrying capacity might be roughly equal, but ultra-light gives AP too, so take that into consideration.

Get ballistic weave: Should be a no-brainer to anyone who’s played the game, but once you’ve got Mk V ballistic weave on your under-armor (and optionally, your hat), your base DR is high enough that you can afford to lose a little bit on your armor if it means getting stat boosts or better carrying capacity. Remember, DR effectiveness falls off at the high end, so you don’t need to worry about optimizing between, like, 250 DR or 270

You can carry 1 more item than your carrying capacity: you’re on your way back to Hangman’s alley, inventory chock full of important scavenge. You come across a legendary radstag and it drops you a mighty gauss rifle. You can’t pass that up, but now you have to drop 25 weight of stuff, right? You could, or you could drop it on the ground, hold the activate button while looking at it, and carry it outside your inventory. It’ll take up your vision, and you’ll have to put it down to fire any weapon, but now you have your rifle and your scavenge!

Prepare to keep dying: just a reminder, you can always die. Grenades will one shot you for a long, long time, and enemies carrying missile launchers will be the bane of your existence. Doesn’t matter how high level you get, as soon as you get complacent, the game will punish you.