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Fallout 76: TOP 5 beginner’s tips and tricks guide

Fallout 76: TOP 5 beginner’s tips and tricks guide

By Denis Marasan ☆ 25/Nov/2018

Here are the TOP 5 tips and tricks that will help to max out your game experience in Fallout 76. This guide is aimed for beginners, though experience players may also check whether they understood how those basic game mechanics work. And don’t forget to check the advanced TOP tips and tricks later!

SPECIAL stats and perk cards could be selected independently

When leveling up and after selecting a SPECIAL stat to distribute your skill point on, you’ll be offered to choose a perk card. At this stage, it may not be obvious that the game offers you perk cards from the stack related to the SPECIAL stat you’ve chosen. Meaning that if you’ve chosen the Strength stat to distribute your skill point on, the perk card stack you’ll be offered to choose a card from will be the Strength stack.

SPECIAL stat selection screen Perk card selection screen - Strength stack

But you don’t really have to choose a perk card from the Strength stack. Just pay attention to the menu bar in the lower part of the screen and press the corresponding buttons to switch between stacks (the “Z” and “C” keys on PC).

If while selecting a perk card you’ll change your mind regarding the SPECIAL stat you’ve already chosen you can always cancel your selection and start over again.

At the end let’s consider how the perk cards work anyway by the example of Slugger perk card.

Slugger perk card - guide

  • A letter in the lower-left corner (that’s “S” in our particular case) means that the perk card relates to the Strength stat.
  • A number in the top-left corner indicates the card Cost. It’s a number of free (not used by other perk cards) SPECIAL points of the stat (Strength in our particular case) you should have in order to equip the perk card.
  • Stars in the lower-right corner indicate the level of the perk card, in our particular case it’s level 1, and the maximum possible level is 3 (stars). If you get the second card you may increase its level. But that will simultaneously increase its Cost. So if you have a card that costs 2 points to equip, and you have only 1 point in the respective SPECIAL stat, you’ll not be able to equip that card.

 

Don’t hesitate to equip and remove your perk cards as appropriate

Perk cards are situational and you can equip or remove cards for free anytime. E.g. Hard Bargain is useful when buying or selling stuff to vendors, Lone Wanderer is useful when you wander alone, and they both apply to Charisma stack.

Don’t hesitate to equip Lone Wanderer when playing alone, change it to Inspirational when playing with friends or to Hard Bargain when buying or selling stuff. Do this every time it’s good for you, that’s how it was all planned.

 

Select appropriate perk cards to carry more stuff

For good or evil Fallout 76 is all about grinding. And to make your stay in the game comfortable you should solve the problem of carrying weight. There’re several ways to address this problem. You may:

  • Spend more SPECIAL points on the Strength stat;
  • Wait until you’ll be able to wear Power Armor that will noticeably increase your weight carrying capacity;
  • Select the appropriate perk cards to decrease the weight of stuff.

Though you shouldn’t underestimate the power of the first two items, the latter has a major impact on comfort. Unlike Fallout 4 where we had only one perk that used to increase the carrying capacity, all specific perk cards in Fallout 76 reduce the weight of a particular stuff category. I personally recommend investing into these perk cards reducing the weight of Aids (Travelling Pharmacy), Food (Thru-Hiker) and Junk (Pack Rat), though there’re perk cards reducing the weight of specific weapon classes, etc.

UPD: make sure you read Recipes and Plans you find in Fallout 76. Those items are stored in the Notes section of your Pipboy and weight 0.25 pounds until you actually learn them (by pressing the “Learn” button, the tip is as usual in the lower bottom section of the screen).

If you're just started playing the game I highly recommend checking the Jump Start Beginner's Guide to Fallout 76.

 

Pick up all loot, scavenge all junk

For good or evil, Fallout 76 is mainly about grinding. So looting dead bodies and scavenging junk is a substantial part of the game. The trick is that you need everything, so the tip is to take everything. You can scrap the items you don’t need and junk you scavenge at any Workshop thus converting them into materials and effectively decreasing the weight you carry.

You should also keep in mind that if you get killed all your junk and raw materials will be dropped on the ground so anyone could pick ‘em up. Store surplus raw materials in your stash box. You can build a stash box in your own Camp or use stash boxes at the Overseer’s camp you find early in the game, Red Rocket gas stations or Railway stations.

 

Scrap duplicate weapons and armor to discover new mods

There’re basically two options of what to do with all that weapons and armor you loot. You can either sell it to vendors or scrap. All our experience in games and real-world activities screams that selling stuff is right, but in the world of Fallout 76, things got a bit complicated.

When scrapping any weapon or armor there’s a chance to discover a new modification for your item. The message informing you that you’ve discovered a new mod is shown in the top left corner of the screen. An alternative way to get mods for your item is buying them from vendors. I personally recommend buying the Pocketed mod for your armor, coz it increases your carrying capacity and makes grinding more comfortable.

So here are my suggestions:

  • Scrap weapons that are duplicate to the one you favor and that you want to upgrade in the future. And sell weapons that you don’t care upgrading to vendors.
  • Check the item condition. If the condition is great, you should opt for selling, coz prices depend heavily on the condition. If the item is in poor condition, you’re not going to get much caps from a vendor, so scrapping the item seems like a better option.
  • You can also create items and then scrap them for the sake of mods. This way you’ll lose some materials, but still, there’s a chance you discover a new mod. Though my own experience shows that the chances of discovery are much lower than when you loot the item.

And no, you can’t remove any mods from weapons or armor you find in Fallout 76 like it was in Fallout 4. Deal with it.

 

Check weapons and armor as favorite and manage your favorites

You can always check any weapon as your favorite weapon and make it ready-accessible during combat. Similar with Stimpacks.

Pipboy - fav item Manage your favorites

  • To simply add an item to favorites you should open your Pipboy, select Weapons, choose an item and follow the instructions from the menu bar in the lower part of the screen (press the “C” key if you’re playing on PC).
  • To manage your favorites leave the Pipboy and press the Fav button (the “F” key if you’re playing on PC or D-pad Up on consoles). The item wheel will appear. Now follow the instructions from the menu bar in the lower part of the screen to manage your favorites.

 

Survey Area by climbing Watchtowers and use Wall Maps to mark undiscovered locations

Watchtowers are not particularly useful, coz you already have a compass at the bottom of screen showing all nearby locations, but this feature makes the game more immersive and creates memorable moments. To try it out you need to find a watchtower (the location of watchtower nearby Vault 76 is shown on the screenshot below), defeat the opposition, if any, climb the tower and Survey Area by pressing the Activate button. After this, you’ll have all nearby locations marked on your map.

Watchtower near Vault 76 Press Activate button to Survey Area

Wall Maps are another great feature in Fallout 76. All you need to do is keep an eye on wall maps in the game, and if you find a wall map showing any locations– press the Select button on these locations to mark them on your map.

Wall Map at Welch Station Press on the pin to add the location on your map

In particular, you may find wall maps at Railway Stations showing all RS in Fallout 76, which is handy.

Unfortunately, you can’t fast travel to the newly discovered locations until you actually visit them, which makes these features not very useful.

 

Don’t play alone

There’re two main reasons why one should play on a team, except for that team play is fun.

The first reason is bonuses you get when playing on a team from perk cards like Inspirational, Bodyguards, etc. To get bonuses you don’t actually have to complete the same quest or even stick together, you just have to be on the team.

The second reason is your teammate’s camps. You can always travel for free to Vault 76 and your own camp. When playing on a team you can also travel freely to your teammate’s camps.

The only contraindication for playing in a team is the amount of skill point you’ll have to distribute to Charisma, cos all these perk cards are from Charisma stack.

You can also check out TOP 5 advanced tips and tricks with black jack and videos!

 

The best tips and tricks beginner video guides: