12 things in Fallout 4 they don't tell you – but you really need to know

“We will all go together when we go,” sang the satirist Tom Lehrer of the nuclear arms race. “What a comforting fact that is to know.” But how wrong he was: Bethesda’s Fallout 4 gives us a post-apocalypse jam packed with survivors, mutations, and all sorts of opportunities for the entrepreneurial survivor.

Much of the appeal of a Bethesda game lies in creating your own adventure in the enormous spaces they provide, but Fallout 4’s many depths are poorly served by the tutorials – even central mechanics are explained with cursory text windows, soon forgotten, or sometimes never touched on at all.

Consequently, some of this world’s real magic can only be found by poking around. Here are some tips about where to look, starring our own character – who, entirely coincidentally, bears a passing resemblance to Jeremy Corbyn.

1. Settlements
There’s a lot of fun in Fallout 4’s Settlements, and if you want to unlock them as quickly as possible, follow the Minutemen questline that starts in the game’s early stages. The first time you meet them everything ends up back at Sanctuary, which is a fine starting point – and even better when you find this hidden basement containing three gold bars and other lovely loot.
Two things are badly explained. The first is that you connect up your power supply by opening the workshop menu and looking for the “connect wire” prompt at the bottom of the screen: laugh all you want but this frustrated me for ages. The second is that once you’ve set up crops or trading stations, you need to assign settlers – also done using the workshop menu. Build a fetching bell like this to pull them all together easily.


This is key to supply lines, which I unlocked and then failed to use for about 10 hours. The upgrade description reads like it works automatically, but you have to assign a settler to cover specific routes – again, through the workshop menu once the option’s available. Some of this is lack of explanation, some is just bad interface design.

2. Massive Damage!
The size of your gun matters, but also incredibly important in Fallout 4 is what your enemy’s resistant to. It’s easy to ignore this but simple to check with the early ‘Awareness’ upgrade for your Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting Systems (VATs) – which shows symbols for the damage types alongside a defence value from low to high. Focusing on using the right weapon scores faster kills and saves wasted ammunition: it’s a critical skill.

3. Hide!
At the top of the bad-explanation list goes the utility of the basic crouch. When you crouch an icon reading [hidden] will appear, indicating your character’s entered stealth mode – and Bethesda’s enemy AI is idiotic, so it’s much easier to hide in plain sight than you’d think. On top of this, if you’re spotted, crouch behind cover and your character will actually take cover – and can lean out at the edges to aim.

4. The Lone-ish Wanderer
One of the biggest problems with Fallout 4 is the limited weight of items your character can carry. There are various workarounds for this (try cooking meat from the cow-like creatures, Brahmin) but by far the best is a trick built into the Lone Wanderer perk. This increases the damage your character can take and the maximum they can carry – as long as you don’t have a companion.

But! Right now, Dogmeat doesn’t count: you can take Lone Wanderer and toddle off with man’s best friend – both keeping the various perk bonuses intact and having a companion to store stuff with. If you’re just going out loot-hunting, there’s no more efficient setup. However, this is almost definitely a bug and is likely to be patched soon.

5. Here Boy
Fairly simple tip, but I wish I’d known this sooner. You can easily lose track of Dogmeat and, unlike other companions, he doesn’t come running to the bell. Always make sure to send Dogmeat to your main settlement and build a dog house for him – then whenever you need to find him, that’s where he’ll be. Makes sense I suppose.

6. Magic Jaws
One final tip for this most noble of animals. On leaving Vault 111 at the start of the game you may have been taunted by the Cryolater, an insanely good gun held behind unbreakable glass with a master lock. To get inside, you will need to become an excellent lockpicker – meaning many hours of play stand between you and the weapon.

No such rules apply to our four-legged friend, however. You meet Dogmeat shortly after leaving Vault 111 and, if you return, can bag the Cryolater. First get Dogmeat to stand in its vicinity, then instruct him to search for items, making sure you’ve cleared everything else lootable. Et voila, the gun warps from the case to this magnificent beast’s jaws – and if you trade items, he’s even stored the ammo too. Good boy!

7. Mod smart
The Gun Nut perk is an essential early pickup, because with this (and later ammo-specific perks like Science!) you can turn a standard base weapon into something like the above. But a key, unexplained thing with weapon modifications is to strip the good ones from guns you don’t want – by replacing them with a lower-tier mod. If you just scrap or sell weapons, the mods go too, but if you strip them you can acquire and use mods you can’t yet create yourself.
8. Personalisation
Renaming your favourite guns can be done at any weapons bench, and allows you to further inhabit that roleplaying experience. On another note, if you want to give your power armour a natty flame look then head straight east from Vault 111 to the Robotics Disposal Ground, where there are a few nice surprises.

9. Colour co-ordination
Notice my Pip-Boy’s attractive white hue? From the game’s pause menu – not the Pip-Boy menu – choose “Display” and you can alter the colour of both the game’s heads-up display and the Pip-Boy interface. One of the best things about this is that the Pip-Boy’s built-in torch reflects your choice – and using white light makes it, to my eyes, much more useful in dark areas.

10. Hangover fuel
All the crafting elements of Fallout 4 can be a pain, but cooking provides all sorts of useful side-effects to replace expensive drugs and medications. Comrade Corbyn is fond, in particular, of drinking some vodka before a big fight – which means he’s always on the verge of alcoholism. But cook up a Radscorpion omelette and bingo, addiction cured, and we can start on the whiskey. Head to the radioactive desert that sprawls across the south-east of the map to get more ingredients than you can handle.

11. You can go back … if you want
Fallout 4’s world is huge but, if you want to re-visit a cleared location with everything re-spawned – from enemies to random loot – the same 30-day rule applies as did in Skyrim. Sit on a piece of furniture anywhere and you can ‘Wait’ for a set time to trigger this respawn manually, the only downside being you have to wait in 24 hour blocks. I’m not saying this is fun or even practical. But if you want to rinse an especially rich building again or replay an especially good fight, this is how.
12. Turn it off then on again
One of Fallout 4’s more serious issues is that you can sometimes end up in a situation like this – where the game has spawned a brahmin inside the house that’s trying to get outside and blocking my only exit. Most glitches aren’t nearly as bad but, if this happens, the classic IT solution applies: just saving and reloading respawns everything and should get your wasteland domination back on track.

Meet Nina Freeman, the punk poet of gaming

The couple are entwined on a small bed in a dormitory room in New York City. Young and inexperienced, they fumble at each other’s clothes, his hands all over her. The camera draws in nearer, almost uncomfortably stark and intimate in the way of all mumblecore movies about the awkward first stages of a new relationship. But this is not an independent film. This is a video game, and the woman on the bed is played by its designer, Nina Freeman. It’s a long way from Call of Duty.

For the last five years, Freeman has been working with small teams of artists and programmers, making intensely personal games about sex and relationships. She came to prominence with the acclaimed How Do You Do It, an interactive skit about a little girl exploring the idea of sex by bashing a Barbie doll and Action Man together. In Ladylike, you control a conversation between a teenage girl and her mother during a drive to the mall. No matter what you say about school, boyfriends or clothes through a series of conversation options, the mum always disapproves. You literally can’t win.

Earlier this month Freeman released her latest project, a multilayered narrative game named Cibele. Developed with small studio Star Maid Games, it’s about the designer’s brief relationship with a man she met in the multiplayer adventure game, Final Fantasy XI, where hundreds of players gather and form online clans to slay monsters and discover treasure.

When you start Cibele, you find yourself accessing a simulation of Nina’s own computer desktop from the time of the affair, complete with folders full of her real photos, poems and live journal entries; but if you click on a specific icon you enter a role-playing game called Valtameri, a fictitious take on Final Fantasy, where you meet Blake, who leads his own in-game clan of fellow players. As you fight monsters in this synthetic adventure, you hear Nina talking with Blake on the phone and see short film sequences, showing her taking selfies and emailing them to him.

It’s a short but complex and self-reflexive experience; a game-within-a-game about the ways in which multiplayer role-playing adventures like Final Fantasy XI double as social arenas where players meet, flirt and gossip. “I wanted to explore the journey that these two went on together in the digital space,” says Freeman, who refers to the Nina of the game in the third-person. “It’s about what it’s like to have these intimate interactions through an online game; what it’s like to be the girl who is sending pictures to her lover over the internet and talking to him on the phone and longing for this physical interaction that feels almost out of reach.”

Although the character of Blake is fictitious, he represents the man Nina met, but is no longer in contact with. “He does know the game exists,” she says. “He got in touch with me and he was like, ‘It’s cool that you’re making this.’” To make things even more complex, his role in the game is played by Freeman’s partner, Emmett Butler, who also worked on the project. Did she find this strange?

“Emmett has worked with me on a number of personal games in the past,” she says. “So he had a good idea of what he was getting into. Filming the intimate scene at the end was a lot easier for both of us, since we know each other so well. Our roommate at the time actually filmed it – it was nice to be able to create that portion of the game with people I feel comfortable around. The voice actor for Blake was actually not Emmett, but a young man named Justin Briner who we worked with remotely. He was really great, too.”

For Freeman, video games have never been the solitary, isolating pastime of common stereotype. As a child in the sleepy coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, her favourite thing was to visit her friends Melanie and Brittany, hide out in their basement and play on a Nintendo console all day, until their parents kicked her out for the evening. Together they devoured games like Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda, sharing the stories as they unfolded on screen. When she discovered Final Fantasy XI at the age of 14, it was a way of meeting up with friends – but also forging new relationships. In Cibele, the player can swap between playing Valtameri and chatting with other characters via simulated instant messaging, email and chat forums. It’s a clever approximation of how we now socially multitask online, seamlessly moving from one window to the next.

Freeman says that in our era of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, this idea of the internet as just another romantic space is prevalent and natural. “For my generation online relationships are basically a normal part of life. A lot of people have contacted me after completing Cibele, saying: ‘Oh wow, this happened to me when I was playing World of Warcraft as a teenager. I was that young girl on the internet, trying to negotiate a relationship with someone I’d never met.’”

For some, the way Freeman explores her own experiences so personally through her games is extraordinary. But she sees many parallels with poetry, which she studied at New York’s Pace University under Charles North. He introduced her to the New York School: Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara. She worked for a while at legendary East Village live poetry venue the Poetry Project.

Later, two things happened: she started hanging out with a bunch of independent game developers who introduced her to offbeat, experimental titles like Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, about the transgender designer’s own transition, and Gone Home, about a burgeoning romance between two teenage girls. She also came down with a chronic illness. “I was suddenly surrounded by game makers,” she remembers, “and I thought, these games are poetry. So while I was sick I had a bunch of free time and taught myself how to program.”

Has she ever been concerned about the implications of putting herself out there so honestly? “Putting myself into these stories in a vulnerable way has definitely taken practice. I’m more and more comfortable with each project. I have learned to separate my present personal life from them, because it could be uncomfortable to feel like critics are talking about me when they talk about the game. Yes, they are talking about me, in a sense, but they are really talking about the character I created based on me. That distinction is important.”

Freeman and her collaborators Emmett Butler and Diego Garcia are now part of a vibrant new era of independent game design. The explosion of broadband internet access, together with the arrival of cheap development tools likeGameMaker and Twine, has meant that almost anyone can make a game now, put it online and find a global audience. Whereas big PlayStation titles require teams of hundreds and budgets of millions, a downloadable indie title can be built by one or two people on a cheap PC.

The result has been an explosion of idiosyncratic titles – but also the emergence of indie gaming scenes and venues. Games have effectively become the new punk rock – or, as Nina sees it, the new poetry: “I saw a lot of parallels with the Beats,” she says. “I was excited because what I found so inspiring in poetry was starting to happen in games.”


With Cibele now finished, Freeman is concentrating fully on her current project,Tacoma, the latest title from Gone Home creator the Fullbright Company. Nine months ago, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where the team is based. Set on a lunar research station, this eerie adventure is an ambitious move for her. “I’ve never made a 3D game before,” she says. “Fullbright is one of the few studios that’s really exploring this idea of games as character-focused narrative spaces; it’s very much about letting the players explore stories rather than being controlled by them.”

But what of our rookie couple in Cibele? Is there a happy ever after to their hook-up? Not exactly. While Blake is confident and seductive online, he shies away from anything more than a single physical meeting: “I don’t think relationships are comfortable,” he tells Nina. It’s not hard to see this as a reflection on the alienation of online relationships but maybe it’s actually just about kids finding new ways to deal with social anxieties.