Fallout 4

[mandru]

Sorry fragger I tend to be too verbose when get on a writing jag. 

Simply put (in example) Sneaking is a tier 3 ability/skill under the Agility aspect.  So if your Agility is at level 3 it will provide less successful Sneaking than having your Agility maxed out at level 10.

While Sneak has its own independent 5 levels (broken down to the first 4 levels providing 20, 30, 40, and 50% difficulty for enemies to detect you and the 5th level makes it so Engaging Stealth will cause the enemy to lose you) having a high Agility level additionally bolsters your overall success in sneaking.


I also realized as I was in bed last night that in that mountain of text I dumped on you I left something out.  At 2:00am it was too late to get back up and add it.

In reference to using the "Alt and Ctrl" keys to preview the benefits awarded for each level upgrade of all the abilities/skills of the SPECIAL tree I neglected to point out that you need to first hover your mouse over the item you want to examine.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, the perk chart isn't self-explanatory, and can be a bit confusing. The more points you put in your SPECIAL attributes, the higher level perks you can get that are listed under each of those attributes. Then, usually, each of those perks has several "tiers" of upgrades. For instance, lock picking, has a few levels, the lower ones just makes it easier to pick a lock, then the upper ones guarantee that you'll pick the lock every time.

For instance, I went for the ones that made me more resistant to damage, so I put a lot of points into endurance, heading for the maximum perks, ghoulish and solar powered. Between the two, you essentially have unlimited health. With both maxed out, standing next to a radiation source while in sunlight will heal you to maximum in a few seconds. To get the highest level for each, you need to put four levels in ghoulish and three in solar powered.

Under the agility attribute, there's Mr Sandman and Ninja. They both increase sneak attacks, and they stack, like I mentioned before, so having both while sneaking with a silenced weapon can deliver a lot of damage, even to the point of one hit kills, fairly early in the game.

Then there's the decision of whether you want to go with single-shot weapons or fully auto, as each has different perks that make them better. Gunslinger and rifleman are both for single shot weapons, pistols and rifles, respectively. Commando is for fully auto weapons. The thing with auto weapons, especially early game, is you waste a lot of ammo. But if that's how you like to play, go for that perk and add mods to weapons that make them fully auto but also increase accuracy. One thing many players w0#k for early is to buy the Spray and Pray from Cricket the weapon dealer. She should show up in Sanctuary now and then. It's expensive, but shoots explosive rounds, and combined with commando perks and upgraded with mods to complement that, it can be a devastating weapon.

You can fool around with perks and abilities here

http://www.levelbased.com/guides/fallout-4/tools/special

Basically, decide how you like to play the most, sneaky, run and gun, sniper, etc and see what perks are best suited to that.

[Art Blade]

reading through those last couple posts shows how differently the game can be played and experienced. Which means, there should be a way to tailor it to everyone's individual needs.

[Art Blade]

fragger, I was just thinking about useful and (somewhat) useless perks for you as a fresh player and character.

It might appear useful to be able to pick locks because you expect something special behind a lock -- why would it have been locked away otherwise. But believe me, there is never any special loot unless you can see it, for instance a locked cell with power armour inside. So, you really don't need lock-picking at the start. It is fun though, the highest pier grants you unbreakable bobby pins.

Something similar is hacking computers. Who doesn't want to check out what the fuss is all about when someone locks their terminal? Well. Useful is when it gets you anywhere you'd otherwise not be able to. And that's when hacking computers is not useful but again, it is fun. You will always be able to find a way around a terminal-locked door OR you will find a password for that specific terminal and door, respectively. So, don't worry. Anything really important will be accessible, anyway. But hacking to it is way more fun. So, you don't need that perk at the start.

What is useful, as it will open more options to you in speech checks, is Charisma from your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. abilities. Speech checks are those on-screen dialogues that require you to choose one out of four. Usually they're all your default colour but they may change to basically green to red, like a traffic light. The more towards red the option is, the more charisma you need to be able to pass that speech check. Passing any of them will allow you either different conversation options (usually you gather intel like that) or change something important. Perhaps something like, she's got the car keys and you got a speech check to get them. No charisma, no car. Maybe it's "Car-isma" in this case.. hehe I think it helped me a lot, I never had to think, "damn, I would have liked to know what would have happened if I had passed that speech check." Because I started out high and maxed it out before I came across speech checks that were too difficult.

Perception is a perk that I rely on the most. Generally speaking, it's your awareness of danger and that translates to it fine-tunes your VATS so you can snap onto a target that's hard to spot, far away, whatever. Perception to your VATS is like a long-range scope to a sniper. Practically speaking, sometimes you're able to pick and kill targets before you even see 'em. Also, you can spot land mines from far away. Useful if you still trigger mines by walking over them.. Perception helps me assess my environment quickly. I feel a lot better after I scanned the area with my perception-pumped high-sensitive VATS and nothing triggered it.

I also wear armour parts that have +1 perception stats as they stack up and add to my SPECIAL base value of perception. Right now, I've got 19 perception which is my normal combat-ready state regarding optimised armour parts. By optimised armour parts I mean I created a set that consists of hat, glasses, "underwear," chest, each a left, and right, arm, and leg armour. All of those parts have one or two added perks if you want to call it that. They have mostly +1 perception each but also one movement speed +10% and a few agility and one charisma. I have reserve gear with me that I can swap out so I get a charisma boost because of my armour but lose my perception boost. However, I can change gear I'm carrying at any time.

Maybe those thoughts are helpful, maybe not.. I rather share them.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah that is true, Art. Lock picking? Just be careful and if a pin breaks, try again, pins are everywhere in FO4 unlike FO3 where they were so scarce I installed a mod to be able to make them. Same goes for computers, if you don't want to (or like me could never figure out) the mini-game of getting the right password, just pick randomly until you have one guess left, then look for those secret bracketed sets of letters that will either remove duds or replenish your guess, and if you don't get it by the last guess, then back out and try again with a fresh set. Usually, it gets a bit easier the second (or third) time you try hacking the same terminal, and I don't think there's a limit to the number of tries on the same terminal unless you use your last guess. Just be careful of that, but almost all of them have another way to open the door or access what is being locked by it, and if it's a quest related door, they will give you another way to open it.

An XP farm of sorts, if you have the patience, is to find a safe that's locked and also controlled by a terminal. Lock pick the safe to open it, then hack the terminal, tell it to lock the safe, then lock pick the safe again, getting the XP, then use the terminal to lock it again, repeat.

Perks to go for early game, for me, would be ones to give you more health or more ability to resist damage, then ones that increase weapon accuracy and/or firepower, then ones that give more finds from looting or drops from dead enemies, usually the luck ones.

[Art Blade]

cheers, D_B and good post, yourself

Cool that you knew about the brackets trick when hacking terminals, I think that trick is by far not commonly known.

XP sources..

..constantly successfully picking locks. And cooking. Each time at any station gives XP so long you produce or change anything. The meat of any animal you kill weighs more than a cooked version of it and usually cooked it has got better specs. So, keep cooking The food is by the way valuable.. might be a good source of income to kill, cook and sell. Collect plants. Which ones you need the most can be checked by using either a cooking or a chem station. The recipes' names show on a list and if you click one, the ingredients list shows to the right. You can even mark those that you don't (yet) have so you can instantly tell what you need when looting something. You can brew chems, drugs, medicine.. make soup and drinks, cook and grill.. whatever you do, the results are usually drastically more valuable than the ingredients plus you carry less "for your money." Oh, ever used a workbench for weapons or armour? Every time you create (as in, change) something, you'll also create a "mod" in-game it will be put into your (!) inventory. Essentially it is a blueprint that can be reused - once, to undo your mod. It contains the version prior to your modification. Now the trick: ignore all of the above regarding mods. Just know you'll have them in your inventory. Now sell them, they're worth a lot, and you'll keep making changes all game long.. sell them. Three reasons: They were made of scrap, the useless and worthless stuff in your workbench. You can make the same mod as many times and at any time you want. It takes away storage in your inventory as it may weigh a lot, especially after like an hour of modifying all your gear. And one more reason: any new mod (because you sold the old one) gives you... XP.

fragger:
the difference between D_B's and my advice is: I've been cheating from the start, including god mode which gave me unlimited ammo and batch files made it easy to run a ton of commands that would, in the end, fill my workbench to the brim with junk that you need to w0#k with.

So, D_B will help you staying alive without cheats while I can focus on the beautiful things in life (lol) but seriously, I think you'll find a ton of useful stuff guys like D_B, mandru and others provided. If you go back to the start of the topic, that's where I started the game, too, then you can read the stuff from the guys and about everything I learned and all the stuff I came across that I thought was worth mentioning. That includes cheat codes, batch commands and links to mods.

You might enjoy reading through all that now that you've got the game yourself 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah the brackets in terminal hacking are in valuable. What I usually do is pick the first three (or four if you've increased hacking guesses with the perk) passwords and if i don't get lucky with those, look for brackets and hope either the duds get removed until there's only one choice left, or the tries get reset. Usually by then the only password left is the correct one.

[Art Blade]

exactly.

fragger, you're probably wondering what the heck we're on about. Once you access the encrypted terminal, look for anything that starts a term (some random digits in a row) with a bracket (opens to the right), for instance "<({[" and move your cursor over any of those brackets until a whole term is highlighted. They look like nothing intelligible but such terms always end (opens to the left) with the opposite type of bracket; e.g. {.§$*#} and if you click that term, it will print a message to the right telling you it either removed a dud (you'll notice that the encrypted screen now has one possible code word missing and instead, there are dots as placeholders) or that your tries were reset (yay, one free game) so better don't click on those first as you could reset your tries with your first try -- great. So, first try to crack the code and before (and therefore without) wasting your last try, you start searching the garbled text for bracketed terms.. 

[mandru]

Regarding hacking terminals.

It may also be worth remembering that the position on the screen of the correct password (on each attempt at cracking open any given terminal) can change with each additional attempt.

And sometimes on rare occasions you will encounter a terminal that doesn't provide cooperative brackets for for dud removal and attempt resets. 

When I was getting started learning how to hack terminals I would stay aware of how many tries I had available and never use that last try.  I would instead close out of the terminal and come back in and retry.  By doing that I learned that the correct password was fully capable of moving around each time I approached each run at hacking a terminal.

Again as I was learning to hack if I had 4 or later 5 (with skill perk) attempts before hopelessly locking up a terminal I would brute force the hack by selecting the passwords in order as presented on the screen stopping short of that final possible guess and if the brackets absolutely failed me I would exit the terminal and come back in as many times as necessary for the correct password to cycle up into one of those first few slots to be triggered by those first few guesses.

It was tedious at times but I always got there in the end using that method and I'm happy that I haven't had to refer to that method for a very long time. 


Also it hasn't been mentioned that when searching the brackets for dud removals and an attempt reset there is the possibility of nested brackets that can occur.

I'll use Art's example of a bracket condition to look for: {.§$*#}

If you encounter a bracket situation like this {{.§$*#} or something like this {.§${*#} where there are two opening brackets mated with a matching closing bracket within the string of characters they will both be available for dud removal or retry reset. 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Right, Mandru, that might not be obvious with the nested brackets. You'll also get different kinds of brackets inside each other. Like [#&%<>^$^], and yes, two brackets right next to each other count, like <> or {} or [] as well.

Closing the screen before your last try is used and re-opening it scrambles the passwords and their positions, you have to start fresh.

Then again, there's always actually playing the mini game like you're supposed to: using the guessed password's results to figure out what the correct one should be, but I could never figure that out reliably. Supposedly, the result it gives you when you guess a word is that the number of letters are both correct and in the correct spot. But you don't know which letters. I tried writing them down once to try to figure it out and could never make sense of it. There seemed to be no way to reliably figure out what the correct response would be given that information. So I just started brute forcing it and guessing, then using the bracketed terms to get the number of possible words down to a reasonable number. So for instance, if you guessed "green" and got a response that three were correct, and after eliminating all others with guesses and brackets, had two words left, "trees" and "sleep", it would be "trees" as that shares three letters with "green" and "sleep" only shares two.

[Art Blade]

I think you've got it right, D_B, as it is exactly what I have observed and thought. And like you, sometimes I had no idea why I couldn't get it right.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I remember once writing down all the options, then marking each one with the number of correct letters, and once I found the correct choice, could not for the life of me figure out how someone was supposed to find the right choice from the information given. There were too many possible matches between the words to find any sort of pattern.

[Art Blade]

worth mentioning the difference between an easy (four digits) terminal and an expert terminal (how many? like 10 to 12 or so digits, I'd guess) password. The maximum of corresponding letters seems to be no higher than 4. So, if you had four matching letters (t r e e) but perhaps one choice left and two passwords to choose from and those were a) christmastree and the other one b) pineappletree, you'd have a 50% chance to *bleep* it up.

Also, on expert, removing duds is funny because the terminal screen starts to look pretty quickly as if there were only dots and a few random chars because the wrong passwords used up so many digits

[Dweller_Benthos]

I see there's an update, more creation club stuff. The hate for creation club on the steam forums is pretty intense.

[Art Blade]

yep, hate it, too. Couldn't play yesterday thanks to that stupid update because F4SE didn't w0#k anymore. I had to wait for f4se to be updated but, at least as of now, it IS updated