A bunch of Fallout 4 tips from my playthrough

by Corey Snyder

Here are a bunch of Fallout 4 tips to remember:

General Tips

  • Sell Fusion Cores to traders before they run out, you will get much more for a partially charged core, over an empty core.
  • Pickpocket enemies with power armor to steal their Fusion Cores, this will cause them to leave the armor, and you can steal the frame
  • The Lone Wanderer perk still provides bonuses with Dog Meat as a companion
  • When Leaving your power armor remove the Fusion Core so no one will decide to use it.
  • When hacking look for [],(), <>,and {} with anything in between the brackets, clicking the leftmost bracket will reset your attempts to give you more tries, or remove dud words from the list.
  • Try to always carry a weapon of each ammo type, that way you are less likely to be completely out of ammo.
  • Some companions can pick locks and hack terminals for you. More specifically: Cait for lockpicking, Nick Valentine for hacking
  • You can tag specific crafting materials by going into your junk section in your inventory, and switch to material view.
  • There is no level cap. Don't fret about spending perk points. The game's enemies don't scale with you, but they do get harder farther from the start, and the farthest away points of the map have level 50 enemies. There's no shortage of things to take down and no shortage of points to get strong enough to do it.
  • To force a companion to equip, or apparel switch to their inventory in the trade menu, and a button will show up to have the npc equip the item. ( "T" for PC, "Y" for Xbox, "Triangle" for PS4)
  • For Power Armor: sprinting, strong melee attacks and VATs drain your Fusion Core faster than walking or standing still.
    Fast Travel in Power Armor doesn't use and Fusion Core battery, and you can still fast travel with no charge in the core.
  • You can zoom in on the pip boy by right clicking.
  • Maxing out relationships with your companions unlocks certain perks.

Crafting

  • You do not need to break down junk items to get components by hand the game will do it for you if the junk items are stored in your settlement workbench or inventory. Extra resources will be deposited in your settlement workbench.(It may take some time to appear)
  • You can grow your own adhesive by cooking Vegetable Starch with Corn, Tato, Muttfruit, and Purified Water.
  • When naming weapons, put a asterisk or space at the beginning of the name (EX: *Super Gun), and those weapons will default to the top of the list in your pip-boy.
  • If you look at the Junk section of your inventory you can switch to a list of all the components your junk breaks down into (with C on PC). In that list you can set or remove a search tag.
  • When you upgrade a weapon, the current mod will be placed in your inventory. If you transfer all mods to your workbench, if you put that upgrade on another weapon, it will use the mod before crafting a new one.
  • You can salvage weapon sights by modifying the weapon with the no sights attachment, which costs no resources to make.
  • If a gun/armour has a mod you can't build, you can still swap the mod out and install it on another weapon.

Settlements

  • Be super cautious about setting up a supply line. It's very hard to undo. Setup supply lines only between your main base, and every other base. Then only put materials in your main base. That way all of your materials are availalbe verywhere.
  • When building settlements you can raise and lower objects by holding E and using scroll wheel on PC, X and L1/R1 on PS4
  • When building your first settlement use E to move the initial workbenches instead of scrapping them.
  • You can remove the radiation from Starlight Drive by scrapping the barrels in the center, and the Unrusted Crashed Car.
  • Water pumps, farms, and traders deposit the Items and Caps they produce into the workbench.
  • To help place objects in hard places use a small rug then place the object on the rug, pick up the rug and the item will remain attached but the game uses the rugs collision detection.(This allows you to clip objects into walls!)
  • To assign settlers select them in the crafting screen then select the object you want them to work
  • Settlers can work up to 6 Food at a time. Meaning a settler can tend to 12 plants that produce .5 food each.
  • To reduce raider attacks make sure your defense state is higher than food + water.
  • Highlighting a settler in workshop mode will also highlight anything he's assigned to.
  • Fast Travel in between settlements will instantly grow all crops that have a settler assigned to them.
  • When your selecting something through the workshop build interface if you press and hold the move command(Press and hold [E]) this will pickup all items attached(or very close) to the object you are picking up. (Be careful as if your walls are all attached you can pickup very large parts of your settlement!)