Blackhawk wrote: Fri Jun 30, 2023 11:55 am
Some other quick early tips:
~Concerning perks: Don't actively spend your choices on the 'Find Extra' perks. If you get them and have extra points feel free to equip them, but you'll generally find more than enough of everything without them.
~Don't plan on having the lockpicking/hacking perks equipped on your actual build. That would take 6 SPECIAL points. What most people do is get the perks, but leave them unequipped (or only equip one) until they actually need it, as you can change your perks on the fly. In other words, you come up on a lock/terminal, unequip one of your combat perks, and equip lockpicking. You pick said lock, then put your combat perk back on. (Personally, I dumped my first legendary perk on the one that gives you 3/3 so that I don't have to worry about it anymore.)
~Particularly good perks: Blocker, Concentrated Fire, Fireproof,
Lone Wanderer (a must if you're solo), Scrapper, Gunsmith (keep it equipped for the reduced wear and tear), Action Boy (unless you're avoid VATS entirely.) At the end game, Starched Genes and Class Freak are a must.
~Until you max Starched Genes and Class Freak, don't keep any mutations (RadAway removes them.) The downsides are pretty heavy. Once you have those perks, though, you can keep the mutations without the penalties.
~You'll generally want to specialize in a single weapon. You can carry as many as you want, and you can fire them, but you'll only have enough perks to really make one of them fully effective (in my current build, I have 12 perk points out of a max of 15 in Perception dedicated just to rifles.)
~At level 25 you'll get access to a card machine that will let you save multiple builds and change your SPECIALs at will. I have separate builds for combat and a generic 'crafting' build that's for both CAMP building and crafting. If I make another, it will either be a farming build or a power armor build.
~The soft cap is level 50. After that you'll keep leveling, but you'll only get perks, not SPECIALS. You also gain access to an alternate 'Legendary Perks' set, one choice every 25 levels starting at 50.
~
An excellent build planner. Once you have a build, the leveling roadmap button on there is invaluable.
~
My current build. Note that this is a single shot weapon/stealth/no power armor build. It isn't the most effective build in the game (if you wanted to make it more effective, you'd switch the single shot perks for Commando.) I find the game easy enough that I don't feel the need to optimize, however.
~
My crafting build. Yes, it's got more perks than points. I swap the perks I'm not using for the ones I am using (IE - if I'm working on energy weapons, I swap out something else for the energy weapon perks.)
~Keep your eye out for train stations. They have vendor NPCs (whose stock is almost always over-priced), they always have a crafting bench and a legendary exchange. It's a machine that lets you turn old legendaries into a special scrip. Save that scrip until the endgame - you can turn it in for new, on-level legendaries then.
~You learn attachments for weapons by scrapping the same sort of weapon. What you get is random, and what you get slows down over time (it doesn't remove what you already learn from the pool of options, and getting one you already know just results in not learning anything.)
~A
convoluted, but very useful tool for determining prices and rarity for items you find.
~If you do set up a shop, note that most legendaries do not sell unless they're priced low and people are buying them for turning into scrip. Pretty much all ammo sells for 1 cap per.
~Weapons and armor have levels, rounded to 5 (IE - you can find level 5 pipe pistols, level 20s, level 35s, level 50s, etc.) You'll want to make sure that you don't let your gear fall behind - it's easy to have a weapon that you love, say a combat rifle, keep scrapping the combat rifles you find later, only to realize that you're level 40, the combat rifle you're using is level 15, and you've been scrapping the level 40s. Or that you're wearing an armor piece that's 20 levels below you. During the leveling, it's expected that you'll recreate the same gun every few levels.
~You start with a low-level backpack with +5 carry weight. You can craft new backpacks at an armor bench every 10 levels (10, 20, etc), all the way up to a level 50 backpack. Each upgrade increases the carry weight by +5.
~You can craft with the materials in your stash. Store all junk.
~Weight warning: Scrap your junk before you store it. Unscrapped junk takes up a ton of Stash space. You might want to check to make sure you haven't deposited any junk already. Scrapping it is easy - any workbench (except a brewing station) will have an option for 'scrap.' Once you hit it, you'll have an option for 'scrap all junk.' Just hit that, walk up to your stash, and you'll have a button for 'deposit all junk.'