You get a tip, you get a tip, and you get a tip!
And you thought we were done with Fallout 4 tips? Ha! It’s almost a crime how many tips and tricks the developers don’t tell you about Fallout 4.
You could spend an entire year of your life running around the irradiated sandbox that is Fallout 4, and you’d still have new encounters to discover and side quests to undertake. The game is simply enormous.
And to survive such an enormous achievement, you’ll need a few pointers, which we are happy to deliver. Sit back, relax, and learn about even more ways to gain the upper hand in Fallout 4’s wasteland.
1. Use ammo as a currency.
Bottlecaps are the preferred fiat currency used throughout the Commonwealth of Fallout 4, but other tender vendors will accept them.
After a short jaunt through the wasteland, you’ve most likely collected a variety of weapons in your inventory. And once you’ve tried a few of them out, you probably have your favorite weapon types. We certainly did. That means you will be hunting for your favorite ammo type and neglecting all other types.
Don’t do that.
The unique thing about ammo is that it takes up no weight in your inventory. So you can carry limitless amounts of ammunition and illicit no penalty. Use that to your advantage.
We stopped using Pipe Pistols early on in Fallout 4. And since we upgraded our Gunslinger perk so much, our handguns did as much damage as rocket launchers. This meant we had an abundance of missiles and .308 ammunition. If we ran across that ammo type in the wild, we still picked it up. It weighs nothing, and missiles go for a good price at most vendors.
Once you settled into your preferred combat style, shotguns, laser rifles, and 10mm pistols, pay attention to other ammo types. Be sure to loot them still; it’s an easy profit.
2. Multiple saves for moral ambiguity
If I could sum up Fallout 4 in two words, it would be moral ambiguity.
If I could use two more words, I’d say, !@#$ Shaun.
But I digress.
Just about every primary quest line in Fallout 4 ends at least two ways. And those ways are usually diametric opposites.
- Do you save the raider, giving her another chance at life?
- Or do you leave them to their fate?
- Do you warn the Brotherhood ahead of time or after the fact?
- Do you join with this faction or that faction?
Each decision bears irrevocable consequences. Once you fully commit to the Railroad, you’ll find fewer potential allies elsewhere. Once you join the Brotherhood of Steel, the Institute perpetually hates you.
There is no way to complete Fallout 4 and keep all your companions, as some will despise you for your choices. And there’s no way to finish Fallout 4 and make everyone happy.
So, how do you experience all there is in Fallout 4?
Multiple save files.
Save your file in a location you’ll recognize, then fully commit to one faction. Follow the quest through all the way. Play it out fully. Then, go back and reload your old save file from before you joined. Now you can join a different faction and experience their storyline.
Save frequently, so when you’re faced with an ambiguous problem of morality, do you “save” the Commonwealth with this drastic plan or that one? You can always go back and make a different decision.
3. Equip your companions for the journey ahead
There are thirteen different companions for you to unlock in Fallout 4. Each comes with their default weapon, suit of armor, base health, damage, etc. Some companions will have more usefulness than others, cough cough, Cait, cough cough. But you can enhance all if you manually alter their inventory.
Select the companion you want to travel with and talk to them. On the dialogue screen, select trade to bring up their inventory. Instead of just giving them junk to carry for you, give them a glow-sighted, suppressed combat shotgun with an extended mag.
Then toss them some shotgun shells. While you’re at it, give them upgraded combat armor, a stimpak so they can heal themselves, and toss in a few grenades for good measure. Suddenly, your companion is a certified badass, lobbing grenades at enemies and taking incoming fire like a tank.
Most companions are close to useless unless you equip them yourself. And in some of the most challenging areas of Fallout 4, you might want your companion to step into a suit of power armor. Doing so dramatically increases your chances of surviving any encounter you come across.
4. Store items in your workbench
If you were anything like us at the beginning of our Fallout 4 journey, you probably built a few different containers in your home to hold all your stuff. Heck, we didn’t even notice the filtering feature at the top of our inventory until hours into our game. So we had several cabinets in our settlement for all the items we weren’t using.
A cabinet for weapons, one for armor, one for junk, one for aid, etc. You get the point. But that meant if we wanted armor, we had to go to the armor cabinet; weapons were in the weapons cabinet.
We were doing it all wrong.
In any settlement you’re allied with, you will find a red-colored workbench. This workbench is what allows you to build your settlement up. You may not know this, but you can also store items in your workbench. That way, instead of carrying building materials in your character’s inventory to craft anything, you can pull from your workbench automatically.
Whatever you’re not using, store it in your workbench. When you want to upgrade a weapon, enhance armor, or build patio furniture, the action will draw from components in your workbench first.
Game changer.
5. Think ahead with your perks
This one might be pretty obvious to anyone experienced with long RPGs, but it’s deadly important in Fallout 4. You don’t want to waste a single perk point in your save file. And since no items in Fallout 4 will reset your points or perks, you cannot undo an upgrade selection.
For this reason, you should scope out the upgrade perk list long before you have the necessary experience.
It’s important to remember that the perk screen is essentially bugged in Fallout 4. There are far more perks than what appears on the screen; you have to move down to see them all. This feature is one of the most hated in all of Fallout.
But now that you can see all the perks, you can start planning your build. We’re a jack-of-all-trades kind of player. We like to have points in just about everything, so we can vary our playstyle whenever we like. But that was hard to pull off in Fallout 4, as the game seemingly wants you to focus on specific skills.
- Are you going to use rifles or pistols more?
- Lasers or ballistic guns?
- Will you rely on your silver tongue to get you out of trouble?
- Will you trust in your stealth skills?
- Will you just beat the !@#$ out of everyone in your way?
It pays to look ahead and determine where your points will go ahead of time. It reduces the chances you’ll waste a point on a useless skill.
6. Connect settlements
This becomes an option once you’ve leveled up enough and put at least one point into the Local Leader perk. This allows you to connect any two settlements that you’re allied with.
But what does that mean?
So, you see tip #4 up there? Let’s say you’ve been following that since the beginning. You have a literal ton of components in your workbench in Sanctuary. The problem is you’re doing the series of quests within Vault 88 and need many components there, not back in Sanctuary.
What do you do?
Well, you could make a lot of trips between Sanctuary and Vault 88, maxing out your capacity every time. But when you’re done, do you carry all the unused material back?
What you could do is connect the settlements. Now, everything in your workbench at Sanctuary is accessible through the workbench in Vault 88.
Connecting settlements allows your workbench to stretch its components to another location. Extremely helpful when building up other settlements throughout Fallout 4.
