Don’t Zeta gun me, bro.
Fallout 4 is a wasteland like no other. Within the irradiated ruins of Boston, MA lies more adventure than 100 hours of gameplay can fully illustrate. There are more dungeons, side quests, and random encounters than anyone can accurately keep track of.
Except for us.
We’ve explored the inner chambers of the Institute and journeyed with the Governor of Goodneighbor; we’ve saved more settlements than we can keep track of, and we’ve killed enough legendary enemies to become legendary ourselves.
And today, we’ll share a few more tips we learned the hard way. These tidbits will help give you an edge in the wide variety of environments and engagements you’ll find yourself wrapped up in throughout the seemingly endless adventure of Fallout 4.
1. Carry multiple outfits & weapons
Different problems call for different solutions. If you’re going through a close-quarters environment, you carry a close-quarters weapon. If you’re walking through an area bathed in radiation waste, you wear a hazmat suit or potentially your Power Armor.
There are many different environments you’ll find yourself walking through in Fallout 4, and each one can be tackled differently. Take the problem of radiation: it’s something you’ll deal with a lot in a post-nuclear world. But there are different ways to handle it.
- Do you dose yourself with Rad-X and walk through like you’re immune?
- Do you take all the radiation damage but fill up with Rad-Away when you’re done, so it all disappears?
We found that carrying a hazmat suit in our inventory negated the problem. If we needed to journey through an area dense with radiation, which was more often than not, we simply changed outfits and kept on with the mission.
Of course, that means you’ll need to find a hazmat suit.
A few missions require you to enter radiated areas, and we found that exploring those areas usually rewarded us with a spare hazmat suit.
Likewise, different enemies will succumb to different weapons. Though carrying different weapons will add weight quickly, it can only help your engagements.
Carry your usual weapon–say, a pistol. But have a science (laser, cryo, gamma, zeta) weapon as a backup, since some enemies take increased damage from them.
But then it’s also a good idea to carry an ace in the hole, something to whip out when !@#$ hits the fan. A rocket launcher, mini-gun, or Fatboy can do the trick. We preferred a hand cannon that fired double bullets and killed most enemies in one shot. But you do you?
2. Cook your food
Did you kill a stunted Yao-Gai? Nice! Don’t eat the meat. Yet.
Eating meat that you find in Fallout 4 gives radiation damage. Radstag, Molerat, Brahmin, and anything else you find roaming about will hurt as it heals unless you cook it.
Find a cooking station, gather some ingredients, and cook several meals at once. Then store them in your settlements inventory and take out meals as needed. Meals provide a much more significant boost to your stats and health, and they don’t bring any radiation damage.
3. Build a bell & companion finder
So you’ve been questing for some time, discovered plenty of locations on the map, and partnered with several companions.
- How do you keep track of all those companions?
- Do you remember where you sent Nick Valentine?
- Is he at his office in Diamond City or your Sanctuary settlement?
Rather than fast-traveling all over Boston in search of your preferred companion, you should build yourself both a bell and Vault-Tec Population Management System.
Build a bell within a settlement and ring it, and all the people in that settlement will stop what their doing to gather around. It’s an easy way of gathering all your settlers together instead of running around looking for the right one.
But say you ring the bell, and the companion you’re looking for doesn’t show up? Well, they’re probably in a different settlement. But which one?
That’s where the Vault-Tec Population Management System comes in. It’s a device that comes with the Vault-Tec DLC, and it allows you to find each of your companions.
It’s a huge time saver.
4. Do all the side quests
If you’re anything like us, you might think that focusing on the major quests will reward the most rewards the quickest. And to a degree, that is true. But some of the most significant quests in Fallout 4 only trigger after you’ve done a set number of smaller side quests.
Therefore, you should do all the quests.
Take the Minutemen, for example. Players will most likely encounter the Minutemen early on in their journey and partner up with Preston Garvy to claim the settlement of Sanctuary.
But there are few developments after that. You get mostly smaller side quests that ask you to form relations with settlements throughout the Commonwealth. Once you form relations with those places, you are sometimes called upon to defend them or help them with supplies.
While incredibly easy, they’re small quests but still a bit tedious.
However, to further the Minutemen quest lines, you need to complete a bunch of those side quests. After you’ve done so, you’ll start to get quests that allow you to form up with other Minutemen survivors, launch an assault on their old fort, and set up mortar canons across the wasteland.
The same can be said for Ada’s quest line and that of the Machinist. Players won’t activate the quest or discover Ada as a companion until they’ve killed a few roaming bands of Machinist robots. Only then will the larger quests trigger.
Do all the quests: even the small, seemingly lame ones. The narrative designers at Bethesda enjoy tricking players. Lulling them in with a small side quest that turns into a massive operation with a rogue Vault Overseer is exactly how they do it.
5. Earn your companion’s trust
Each companion you encounter throughout Fallout 4 has a unique personality and playstyle. Some love it when you’re tough, blunt, and do what you want during interactions; others would rather you be a nice wasterlander. While it requires you to alter your playstyle slightly depending on the companion you have with you, it’s worth mixing things up to get on their good side.
Once you earn enough trust with a companion, they’ll start to open up with you. They’ll tell you about their past, their goals, and what they’re looking forward to in the future.
Once you’ve triggered a few spontaneous conversations, you’ll open up the companion’s unique side quest. This quest is tied to their character in a significant way and how you handle the quest determines the companion’s personality for the rest of the game.
Once you’ve beaten the quest and picked up all that sweet XP, you’ll gain the highest form of trust from your companion. And with that trust comes a special perk that makes you even more badass.
Reach the highest level of trust with Nick Valentine, and you’ll gain the Close To Metal perk, which gives an extra attempt when hacking any terminal. And if you partner up with Cait long enough and help her get fully and completely clean, you’ll gain the Trigger Rush perk, which increases action point regeneration when your health is below 25%. All of them are helpful perks.
And once you’ve gained their full trust, you can switch to the next companion and alter your playstyle again. It’s an easy way to keep the gameplay of Fallout 4 fresh throughout the experience.
Putting it all together
Fallout 4 has more content than should be allowed in video games. You might think you’ve explored its map, talked to the rarest encounters and killed the craziest mutants. But we guarantee that there’s something you missed. Using all these tips, and the others we already mentioned, will ensure you survive the worst of Fallout 4’s Commonwealth. Be sure to check out our Fallout 4 beginner’s tips too!
