Fallout 4: Beginner's Guide & Best Tips - Game Guide
Fallout 4: Beginner's Guide & Best Tips gameplay screenshot Fallout 4: Beginner's Guide & Best Tips screenshot 2

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Honest Take: Why Fallout 4 is a Messy Masterpiece

Yeah, I'm gonna say it. Fallout 4 is a broken, beautiful disaster that I've sunk 800 hours into and I'll probably never stop playing. It's the game I come back to when I need to feel like the world ended but I still have a chance to build a nice chair. The combat feels punchier than any other Fallout, the world is packed with locations that tell stories without a single word of dialogue, and the gun modding system is so deep I've spent entire afternoons just trying to make a pipe rifle that doesn't look like it was built in a trash can.

But let me be real with you: the game does NOT hold your hand. The main quest will railroad you into a faction choice that feels rushed. The settlement system, which everyone hypes up, is actually a buggy mess if you don't know the specific tricks to make it work. And if you're coming from Skyrim expecting a perfectly balanced leveling system, you're going to get wrecked by a radroach at level 30 because the scaling in this game is drunk.

The magic here is the emergent chaos. I've had moments where I'm sneaking through a super mutant infested warehouse, my last stimpak is gone, my fusion core is beeping at 5%, and I find a Fat Man with exactly one mini nuke. That's Fallout 4 at its best 鈥?desperate, stupid, and perfect.

But I've also had moments where the game soft-locks a quest because I picked the wrong dialogue option and now Preston Garvey is mad at me for breathing. The game has problems. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. What I am going to do is tell you exactly how to survive the bullshit so you can enjoy the good parts.

Why This Game Makes You Want to Throw Your Controller

Look, I've been there. I started my first playthrough thinking "I'll play on Survival because I'm a gamer." I spent an hour dying to molerats at the Corvega Assembly Plant and rage-quit for three months. The game cheats. It's not fair. But you can cheat back.

Here are the specific walls people hit, and exactly how to get past each one.

"I can't beat the first Deathclaw at the Museum of Freedom." This is the boss that makes everyone save-scum. The trick isn't to fight it head-on. The Deathclaw has a blind spot when it climbs over the collapsed overpass. Run back into the museum, climb to the second floor balcony, and shoot it from the gap in the railing. It can't pathfind to you. I did this on my second playthrough and felt like a genius. The thing has 1500 HP on normal difficulty. Don't waste bullets trying to be a hero. Use the minigun until the barrel glows red, then switch to your pipe pistol. The minigun does 8 damage per hit but the fire rate is 30 rounds per second. That's 240 DPS for about 4 seconds before you overheat. Use it in bursts.

"I'm constantly out of ammo and caps." This is because you're hoarding everything. Stop looting every desk fan. Seriously, drop the desk fan. Caps are everywhere if you know where to look. Go to Diamond City and find the noodle stand next to the gate. You can sell every pre-war money you find 鈥?it weighs nothing and is worth 8 caps each. I made 600 caps in the first two hours by grabbing all the money from the bank vault in Lexington. Also, stop buying ammo from vendors. Craft Ammo Mill workbenches once you have the Science! 4 perk. You can turn one lead and one steel into 5 rounds of .38 or 2 rounds of .45. That brings the cost per bullet down to almost nothing.

"I can't survive more than two hits." The game's armor system is lying to you. Damage Resistance (DR) has a curve where after about 250 DR, each point is worth less. You don't need to stack a million pieces of combat armor. What kills you is bleed damage (from dogs and ghouls) and energy damage (from lasers and plasma). Get a piece of lead-lined armor (sold at Fallon's Basement in Diamond City) and a Combat Armor chest piece with the "Tempered" mod. That gives you 140 DR and 80 energy resist. That's enough to survive three shots from a raider with a pipe rifle. The rest is about positioning, not gear.

"The settlement system makes no sense and I keep getting raided." Oh God, the settlement system. Bethesda designed this thing, played it once, and said "good enough." The problem is that DEFENSE needs to be higher than FOOD + WATER combined. If your defense is lower, you get raided every 72 in-game hours. The fix: build 12 turrets (they cost 4 steel, 6 gears, 3 oil each) and only plant 4 mutfruit plants (each gives 0.5 food). Don't bother with tato or corn 鈥?they attract raiders. A settlement with 50 defense and 6 food will never get hit. I tested this across four settlements. Trust me.

First Steps: What I Wish Someone Screamed at Me Before I Left Vault 111

You wake up. Your wife is dead (or husband, depending). The cryopod opens. You grab the Pip-Boy. Now, before you do anything stupid, listen.

SPECIAL stats matter more than you think, but not how the game tells you. You don't need 10 in every stat. The game gives you a book in your house in Sanctuary (on the dresser next to the crib) that lets you add one point to any stat, but you can only use it once. Save it. Don't spend it on something stupid. Put it into Intelligence if you want more XP (Intelligence adds 3% XP per point), or Agility if you want more action points (AP. 10 AP per point).

The best starting build for a first-time player who doesn't want to suffer: Strength 4, Perception 3, Endurance 3, Charisma 6, Intelligence 4, Agility 5, Luck 2. This gives you access to Armorer (rank 1), Locksmith (rank 1), Toughness (rank 2), Local Leader (rank 1 鈥?THE most important perk for settlements), Science! (rank 1), Gunslinger (rank 1), and Gun Nut (rank 1). That's enough perks to survive the first 20 hours without respecing.

The first thing you should grab after leaving the vault: Go to Sanctuary Hills. There's a workbench on the left side of the cul-de-sac, under a carport. Scrap everything. Build a small generator (crafts from 4 rubber, 3 copper, 8 steel), a water purifier (crafts from 4 rubber, 3 gears, 2 copper, 1 screw), and put it in the river. That gives you 3 purified water per day. That water is weightless, stacks infinitely, and sells for 12 caps each to any general vendor. I made 1200 caps by day 7 doing nothing but collecting water from my own settlement.

Now, don't go to Concord immediately. The game pushes you toward Preston and the Minutemen right away, but that Deathclaw fight is a noob trap. Instead, go south toward Lexington. There's a Hardware store there with a guaranteed Combat Rifle on the back room shelf. It uses .45 ammo and has 38 base damage. That single rifle will carry you through the first 15 levels. I found it by accident and it doubled my effectiveness.

Save your first 3 perk points until you reach level 5. By then, you'll know what kind of weapons you've found. If you get a shotgun, pump points into Rifleman (Strength 2 required). If you get an automatic weapon, go Commando (Agility 2). If you're using pistols, Gunslinger (Agility 1). Don't spread your combat perks thin. A character with Rifleman rank 2 (+20% damage and ignores 10% armor) using a Combat Rifle outdamages a character with three rank 1 combat perks using an Assault Rifle. Focus matters.

Expert Tricks That Save Your Run (And Your Sanity)

These are the things I learned after my fourth playthrough. The devs didn't tell you. The wiki is wrong about some of this. I have the scars.

The "Jet Pack" trick for free high-ground. You can get a jet pack modification for power armor at Armorer rank 4 and Science! rank 4. It costs 10 aluminum, 6 adhesive, 8 rubber, 4 fiberglass. Once you have it, you can hover for 25 AP per second. But here's the part nobody talks about: if you jump off a building and use the jet pack right before you hit the ground, you take zero fall damage. The game counts the jet pack activation as "flight." I survived a fall from the top of Mass Fusion Building (the tallest building in the game) by doing this. You have to time it for the last 0.5 seconds before impact. Practice in Sanctuary before you try it in a combat zone.

The "Wasteland Whisperer" perk is not a meme. Most guides say this perk is trash. They're wrong if you know how to use it. At rank 1, you can pacify any animal below your level 40% of the time. That includes Deathclaws. A pacified Deathclaw becomes a temporary companion that deals 150 damage per swipe and has 800 HP. The trick is to use it when the Deathclaw is below 50% health 鈥?the game's pacify check formula checks remaining HP. I pacified a Legendary Deathclaw at level 22 and it soloed a group of 8 raiders. It lasted the full 120 seconds before the effect wore off. Total game-changer for early game running.

The "Crippling" effect on weapons is broken OP. Any weapon that rolls a legendary effect with the word "Crippling" (like "Crippling Pipe Pistol") has a 20% chance per hit to instantly cripple a limb. If you shoot a super mutant behemoth in the leg, its movement speed is cut by 70% for the rest of the fight. I used a Crippling Laser Pistol (dropped from a ghoul near University Point) to kill a Behemoth at level 16 without taking a single hit. The trick is to aim for the feet. The hitbox is smaller, but the cripple proc ignores that. Just spam shots at the ground near their feet.

Save-scumming is allowed and you should do it. The game crashes. A lot. On Xbox Series X, it still crashes every 4 hours. On base PS4, more like every 2. Quicksave (F5 on PC, LB+RB on console) every 5 minutes. I lost a 3-hour survival run to a random crash in the Glowing Sea. I didn't play the game for a month after that. Use three save files and cycle them. Don't overwrite a save from 10 minutes ago if you just finished a big fight.

The "Sneak Attack" multiplier stacks with distance. The game tells you that sneak attacks do 2x damage (pistols) or 3.5x damage (rifles) with the appropriate perk. What it doesn't tell you is that if you are 100 feet or more away, there's a hidden 1.3x multiplier on top of that. This is how you one-shot Legendary enemies. Grab a Hunting Rifle with a Long Recon Scope modify it with .50 receiver (requires Gun Nut rank 3), and take a shot from a rooftop in Goodneighbor. Total damage: 78 base + 3.5 from sneak + 1.3 from distance = 354 damage per shot. That kills most humanoid enemies instantly.

Hard-earned pro tip: I wasted 40 hours of my life trying to make the "Robot Workbench" work. It's a DLC item from Automatron. The game tells you you can build robots. What it doesn't tell you is that if the robot is not assigned to a supply route, it will reset to default settings every time you fast travel. I built a sentry bot with heavy armor and dual miniguns, fast traveled to Diamond City, and came back to a Mr. Handy with a buzzsaw. Now I never assign a robot companion to anything except supply lines between settlements. If you want a combat robot, use Codsworth as a companion and modify him at the workbench 鈥?he doesn't reset because he's flagged as a named NPC. Save yourself the frustration.

Six Mistakes That Killed Me Dead (Don't Be Me)

I've died more times than I can count. Here are the specific dumb things I did so you don't have to.

1. Selling fusion cores early. Fusion cores power your power armor. They weigh 4 pounds each. Vendors don't pay much for them 鈥?30 caps max without high Charisma. You'll need a minimum of 12 fusion cores to wear power armor through the main quest. I sold one at level 8 because I needed caps for ammo, then found out you can't get power armor without one. The best source early: inside the Robotics Disposal Ground (near the Federal Ration Stockpile), there's a dead sentry bot with 1 fusion core and a Power Armor frame nearby. Don't trade them. Stash them at a settlement workbench.

2. Ignoring the "Lone Wanderer" perk. This perk is insane for solo players. At rank 1, you get 15% damage reduction and +15 carry weight. At rank 2, you get +20% damage with all weapons. And here's the thing nobody mentions: Dogmeat doesn't count as a companion for this perk. You can have Dogmeat with you and still get the full Lone Wanderer bonuses. I ran an entire playthrough with Dogmeat and the damage reduction was the only reason I survived the Glowing Sea at level 20. The carry weight bonus is also huge 鈥?those extra 15 pounds mean you can carry a second power armor frame without being overencumbered.

3. Building turrets that face the wrong way. I built a massive fortress at Starlight Drive-In. 40 turrets. All facing outward. Got attacked by super mutants from the south. My turrets were facing north, east, and west. The super mutants walked right up to my generator and blew it up. The enemy pathfinding in settlement attacks comes from random spawn points about 200 feet from the workshop. If you build turrets on concrete foundations at the center, pointing in a 360-degree ring, you'll catch every spawn. I now build turrets on raised platforms that are 2 stories tall 鈥?the height gives them a better field of view and enemies can't melee them.

4. Trying to do the "Silver Shroud" quest at level 10. The Silver Shroud quest from Goodneighbor sounds fun. You get a costume. You get to roleplay as a vigilante. The enemies are level-scaled to 35. I went in at level 12 with a 10mm pistol against raiders with combat shotguns. I died 14 times. The Silver Shroud armor has zero damage resistance (only 15 energy resist), and the quest forces you into a room with 9 raiders that spawn in waves. Wait until you have at least 200 DR and a weapon that does 50+ damage per shot. I came back at level 30 with a fully modded Combat Rifle and it was still tough.

5. Using the "Furious" power fist without the Iron Fist perk. The Furious Power Fist is a unique weapon from the Swan boss in the Boston Common pond. It does 15 base damage but has the Furious effect: each consecutive hit on the same target does +15% damage, stacking up to +150%. Seems amazing. But without the Iron Fist perk (Strength 8 required), unarmed damage is pitiful. I spent three hours trying to kill Kellogg with just the Power Fist and got demolished. Unarmed weapons need Iron Fist rank 3 (that's +50% damage) before they can compete with a basic rifle. Don't bother with any unarmed build until you have at least Strength 8 and that perk.

6. Overencumbering myself constantly. The groan of "I need to drop some junk" is the most common sound in Fallout 4. But the real mistake isn't carrying too much 鈥?it's carrying the wrong junk. Every item has a weight-to-component value. Aluminum (weight 0.2, gives 3 aluminum scrap) is worth keeping. Glass bottles (weight 0.8, gives 1 glass) are trash. The most efficient junk: duct tape (weight 0.5, gives 1 adhesive, 1 cloth), clocks (weight 1, gives 2 gears, 1 screw, 1 spring), and wonderglue (weight 0.5, gives 2 adhesive). Everything else, scrap it on sight and store the components. I now run with a carry weight of 210 (Strength 3 + Lone Wanderer) and I never pick up anything heavier than 1.0 weight units unless it's a weapon I'll use immediately.

FAQ: The Stuff You're Too Embarrassed to Google

Q: How do I get more adhesive?
A: Adhesive is the single most important crafting component. Every weapon and armor mod uses it. Vegetable starch is the answer. Build a cooking station and combine 1 corn, 2 tato, 1 mutfruit, and 3 water. Each batch gives you 5 adhesive. Plant those crops at any settlement with a water source. I have a dedicated farm at Abernathy Farm that produces 30 adhesive per day.

Q: What's the best early settlement?
A: Not Sanctuary. Sanctuary is too spread out, and the houses have holes in the roofs that let radroaches spawn inside. Go to Starlight Drive-In (northwest of Lexington). It's flat, has a big concrete pad in the middle where you can build a central fort, and there's a pre-war trunk under the overhang that has 5 fusion cores (actually it's random, but I got 5 once and I'm biased). There's also a water pond with a working pump at the back.

Q: Can I romance everyone at once?
A: Yes, but not without the Lady Killer or Black Widow perk at rank 2. The game only flags you as "in a relationship" with one companion at a time, but you can sleep with all of them if you max out their affinity separately. I romanced Piper, Cait, and Curie in a single playthrough by keeping them at base and rotating their companion quests. The game doesn't punish you, but some dialogue choices lock the romance path. Save before the final conversation with any companion 鈥?if you pick the wrong dialogue option, the romance flag stays off permanently for that character.

Q: How do I survive the Glowing Sea?
A: You need Rad-X (five of them, they stack for about 15 minutes total), Radaway (10 doses), and power armor with a lead-lined frame (reduces rad intake by 50%). The route: start at Crater of Atom, run south toward the Sentinel site (the building with the crashed vertibird). Don't stop for anything. The rads there tick at 15 per second even with good gear. You can survive about 3 minutes without armor upgrades. Also, Lone Wanderer rank 1 gives 15% damage reduction that works against radiation damage. I didn't know that until my third trip in.

Q: Is the "Sniper" build good?
A: Sniper builds work, but the game has a problem where enemies spawn out of thin air about 50 feet from you. Trying to snipe from a rooftop is suicide because a super mutant with a minigun will materialize behind you. The best sniper build uses a Combat Rifle with a long barrel and semi-auto receiver 鈥?not a Hunting Rifle. Hunting Rifles have a bolt-action that takes 1.2 seconds to cycle, during which you're standing still. Combat Rifles cycle in 0.4 seconds. The damage difference is 10% but the DPS difference is triple. I retired my Hunting Rifle at level 15 and never looked back.

Q: What difficulty should I play on?
A: If you're new, Normal. Not Very Easy (the game becomes boring because enemies do 0.5x damage and you walk through them). Not Hard (enemies become bullet sponges with 2x HP). Normal gives 1x damage to you and enemies, which feels balanced. Survival mode makes enemies do 2x damage to you but you also deal 2x damage to them 鈥?it's not "harder" so much as "punishes every mistake." I did Survival once. I died to a radscorpion that spawned in my fast travel spot. Never again.

Q: Is the "Big Guns" build worth it?
A: No. Stop. Put down the minigun. The minigun has 8 base damage per round. A missile launcher does 90 damage per hit but the ammo is rare (missiles cost 25 caps each from vendors). Big Guns make you slow, the ammo is heavy, and the weapons jam constantly (the minigun has a 3-second spin-up time). I tried a pure "Heavy Weapons" build once and ended up using a combat shotgun half the time because I ran out of 5mm ammo. Big Guns are for blowing up specific bosses, not for general play. Keep a missile launcher in your inventory for Deathclaws, but don't build your character around it.