Fallout 4

Fallout 4 is unusually forgiving for a game with this reputation. Caps come back. Junk respawns. Settlers keep walking in. The radiant quest boards will generate work for as long as you keep asking, and a bad attribute spread costs you time rather than the run. Nearly everything the Commonwealth takes from you, it will eventually hand back.

There is one exception, and the whole game bends around it. Three of the four factions will destroy each other, and choosing one closes the others permanently. This hub is organised around that split: the things you can experiment with freely first, and the one decision worth understanding before you make it.

Start with what cannot be lost

Before anything irreversible, there is a lot of the game that is pure gain. Twenty bobbleheads and a set of stackable magazine runs will permanently improve your character, and our items guide sorts the whole collectible layer by whether a pickup actually edits your character sheet or just fills a pocket. It is the single best return on an evening in the game.

The systems underneath are covered in the mechanics guide, which sorts them by whether they run while you are looking away. Crafting and hacking wait for you indefinitely; settlement happiness and Survival mode's debuffs do not. If you are levelling slowly, our level up fast and power leveling guides are the quick versions, and Survival mode tips covers the difficulty that punishes ignoring any of it.

Build a character, then a base

You spend 28 attribute points before you have seen a single enemy. Our builds guide compares seven spreads of that same budget by which attribute each one buys and which it sells, which is a more useful comparison than a ranking because the trade is the whole decision.

From there the map opens up. The locations guide sorts places by what you can build on them, from the 30 workstations that make a site claimable through Vault 88 and the Far Harbor workshops down to the hidden corners worth exactly one visit. The people who fill those places are in the NPCs guide, ranked by how much leverage you have over them: creatures you can only fight, traders you visit, the eight expert merchants you have to recruit and build a shop for, and the factions whose attitude you actually set.

Gear is mostly a shopping problem

The counterintuitive part of Fallout 4's loot is that the best of it is rarely hidden. Most of the named armour in the game is sold by a handful of vendors standing behind counters, which our armor guide turns into a shopping route rather than a scavenger hunt, with the Automatron Tesla set as the one piece of power armour you have to fight for.

The weapons guide reads the ten unique weapons by their effect rather than their gun, because an unlimited magazine or Action Points on critical hits changes a build in a way raw damage does not. It also flags the pair on that list you can never own in the same save, which is where the faction problem starts to show through the loot.

The decision that closes doors

The quests guide is the one to read before you commit. It sorts all seventeen of our quest pages by what each closes behind you: radiant boards that never run out, side quests and DLC lines that close only themselves, and the four faction storylines that share endgame beats and cancel one another. Three of them contain a specific quest that permanently destroys a rival; the Minutemen are the only line without one, which is why they are also the only faction you can fall back on after everything else collapses.

The add-on content sits outside all of that. Starting Automatron needs you at level 20 and nothing else, and Far Harbor's outcome is decided by choices covered in the mechanics bucket rather than by a final fight.

Companions, mods and the technical side

Two other things people look for early. Companions can be romanced, and our romance options tier list ranks them for anyone who wants to know which relationships are worth the perk before investing in one.

On PC, the PC tweaks guide covers performance and the Fallout4Prefs.ini settings worth changing, installing mods covers getting community content running, and the console commands and item codes pages are there for when you would rather skip a step than repeat it. For the historical curious, our Gamescom gameplay leak report is still up from before the game shipped.

Where to go first

Everything above goes a layer deeper and then hands you off to the detailed page for each job. The one thing worth repeating: the Commonwealth will give you a second chance at almost anything except an allegiance, so spend the early hours on the parts that cannot be taken away.