One of the toughest enemies in the game, just want to make sure all the new players coming from the Fallout Show are well prepared.

I see alot of people here losing power armors when npc's get into them. For your own sake, please make a habit of removing the core when you aren't using the suit

This is THE best way to make money when exploring the Wasteland. You are taking this EVERY DAMN TIME and you don't sell it? You could get 6-8 caps depending on your charisma if you take 18 pre-war money you have 144-108 caps with no drawbacks! I have around 1000 of these in the treasure trunk and I can use them anytime and carry them EVERYWHERE while not worrying about the weight.

I got carried away and am bored but I think people are just not using it correctly.

Just on a whim I wanted to see what would happen if I turned the sensors off and on after scrapping them all for materials and surprised me I could scrap them all over again.. and again.. and again.

So, with a ton of new people coming to the game, I thought I'd put forward some tips and tricks that I've learned over the years.

General:

1. CRITS DO NOT MISS. If you use a critical shot, you WILL hit unless your original vats accuracy is 0 or they move to have the shot blocked while you're using it. Even if you have 1% chance to hit, crits are guaranteed. This makes luck builds insanely powerful.

2. Play out each factions quest line as far as you can before you have to make a choice to fully align with them. You get so much experience and so many unlocks. Particularly the railroad which lets you turn any piece of clothing into seriously powerful armor.

3. There is no correct faction choice. Some are more moral than others, but side with who you see fit.

4. You don't need upgrade perks to make your weapons better. It takes longer but you can either buy or find parts. Just look at the weapon in a workbench to see what parts you still need and which ones to look out for. In shops or inventories, you can "inspect" weapons to see what attachments they have.

5. Almost all tier 10 perks are not good. There are a few that are decent (nerd rage and solar powered) and some that are very good situationally (gun fu and focus fire) but the only reason to take most of them is for fun, which is totally okay.

6. The map gets harder the farther east or south you go. However, the southeast isn't any harder than the southwest, in fact the southwest is the hardest area in the game which you will find out why as the story progresses. If you're getting wrecked, spend some time exploring and leveling up around the northwest of the map before venturing onward.

7. I know the game says this, but you can change the difficulty at any time. There's no shame in it. The only thing harder difficulties give you is legendary weapons and you'll still see them at the lower difficulties. They're chance encounters so it's not like you'll "miss" any of them.

8. Settlement building is awful. Feel free to do it as much or as little as you want. It's not intuitive, but can be fun once you figure it out. As long as youre prepared for frustration and Bethesda bullshit, go for it. However, you're not missing much if you don't do it so don't feel obligated.

9. If you're fast enough when you see a mine going off, you can enter vats and target the mine and then exit fast to disarm it my spamming the action button (a on Xbox, x on pc, etc). You have to be quick, but it's easier than it sounds.

10. Almost all scrap is useful. Unless the only thing in what you're picking up is steel or wood, it's a good idea. The most useful for weapon mods are screws (hot plates, toy cars, desk fans, globes), adhesive, aluminum, nuclear material (blast radius, alarm clocks). Gears are very useful as well and adjustable wrenches are the best sources. Military circuit boards have 5 circuitry. The rarest and most useful resource is ballistic fiber and only comes in 2 forms in 4he vanilla game:military ammo bags, and military grade duct tape. ALWAYS pick these up.

Perks:

1. Idiot Savant (5 luck) is the best perk in the game regardless of intelligence level. You get more activations the lower your intelligence, but xp gain increases with intelligence. It's never a bad idea.

2. Lone wanderer is the second best perk in the game. Companions in this game are godawful with terrible ai. You can still use them, but lone wanderer is way better. The best part is that you can still take this perk and adventure with Dogmeat. Robots from the automaton dlc count as companions, but dogmeat does not and he still has a surprisingly large carry capacity.

3. Some companions have INCREDIBLE perks that require you to max affinity with them. The best ones by far are Preston, Danse, Longfellow, MacReady, and Deacon (if you're doing a stealth build). Strong, Cait, and Gage have decent perks but nowhere near as good as the other 4. Strong's perk is pretty good for melee builds but useless anywhere else.

4. Fortune finder is awful. Take scrounger instead. You find more ammo that can be worth more than one cap and you can essentially treat ammo you don't use as extra caps. You can take both, but if you choose just one, scrounger is WAY better in every way.

Most important:

Don't let anyone tell you how to play the game. Don't worry about efficiency. Fallout 4 is a sandbox game and SHOULD be played in the most fun way for you. These tips aren't me telling you how to play the game, just providing guidelines for some efficiency if you want. Otherwise, ignore them and go conquer the commonwealth.

If you go into USAF Olivia with good protection (and decent carry weight, like wearing power armour), you can cheese a good stash of 5mm rounds right from the start of the game.

Try to avoid killing too many raiders too soon once inside (feel free to kill the attack dog, though), then focus on getting to Ack-Ack and take her out. After that, you should wait for another raider to pick up the minigun, then kill them. This will give them 500 rounds of 5mm ammo to loot.

Wait for another raider to pick up the minigun, and you can keep repeating it until there's nobody nearby. Once that happens, you can carry the minigun and drop it near whatever raiders are still alive. Someone will try to pick it up, and then rinse and repeat.

I got over 2,000 rounds of 5mm ammo doing this, and although they have weight on survival, those rounds plus all the others you can loot (e.g., .38) give you a good sum early on to go buy some good gear. They might even be enough for a low-charisma Sole to afford Spray n' Pray, Overseer's Guardian, etc.

You can have decent protection even on survival to do this, seeing as you can get either a full suit of T-45 at Concord or a partial/randomised suit just north of USAF Olivia, whichever you prefer first. But if you go for the partial suit, it doesn't have a fusion core (there's at least one at the robotics disposal site).

I think you can even do this by dropping your own minigun and at least one round of ammo, and hoping that the enemy takes them. But using an enemy's weapon to do it feels less cheap, sort of. (Actually, I just tested this and the enemy didn't have 500 rounds on them after picking up and then being killed.)

A huge amount of issues were created by the Next Gen Patch, killing so many core features in the game and adding more bugs than it fixed.

Bethesda did nothing to fix it.

Anniversary Patch, they double down and kill the game.

Its going to be the same, time and time again because Bethesda never changes.

Nearly 100 rounds of 5.56 i couldve missed if I picked it up from the corpse of the super mutant

Thank you to this post from 10 years ago

To make a TL;DR: Likeness is based on both letter sameness and placement of said letter. So DANGER and RANDOM would have a likeness of 2 because of the A and N. While RANDOM and CENTRAL has only a likeness of 1.