Surviving the Wasteland is no joke, as there are countless beasts lurking around and dangerous radioactive environments to tackle. On top of that, you’re always in a panic to check up on your hunger, thirst, and other needs.
Traversing the land is also essential for scavenging materials and important resources. In such a hefty run, we’re here to provide you with Fallout 76 Beginners Guide to provide a smooth experience where things are satisfying rather than frustrating.
Fallout 76 Beginners Guide
When you first start your playthrough of the game, you won’t immediately be set out to venture the open world. You need to take your time with the vault itself first.
Explore around to see what you can gather in terms of resources like water supplies, C.A.M.P Device, Perk Cards, and more that will definitely help you in the world out there.
You will also get familiar with some of the mechanics and controls if this is your first time with a Fallout game.
The first set of quests that you’ll be involved in will be related to acquiring the Holotapes, and engage in the Responders questline.
Then there’s a bit of lore and background knowledge that you can retrieve from Holotapes within the vault. You can return to Vault occasionally for a quieter day and change in pace or just being able to fast-travel through it.
Materials and Supplies
Once you embrace the open-world, there’s still a lot to be discovered and your survival isn’t guaranteed until you salvage more items.
One of these important resources is junk which can be further modified by scrapping for cooking, building, and material crafting.
For this purpose, every plastic cup, corkscrew, a piece of wood, and other sundry items contribute to crafting support items and weaponry. You’ll also be hunting for other life-retaining sources including food and water supplies, and only the pure sources.
Some good places to start out in terms of supplies potential include:
- The Greenbrier Resort for general supplies.
- Horizon’s Rest for various firearms, ammunition, and armor.
- Top of the World Ski Lodge for the melee weapon, Ski Sword.
- In areas where you are shown an on-screen prompt ‘verdant season’. These have plantations consisting of useful herbs for crafting and curing diseases.
While collecting junk, in the process, you might breach your limit of carrying capacity and thus move at a sluggish pace while consuming Action points at an alarming rate.
For that purpose, you can store your components and materials that you gathered at Vault-Tec Stash back at your CAMP.
You can also find this technology at Overseer’s Camp, train stations and red rocket filling stations.
For weapons and ammunition, exploration should be focused on looking around pipe pistols or pipe revolvers for a start since these can be found riddled in containers, cabinets and many other locations.
For more powerful weapons like rifles and shotguns, you’ll need to take the fight to the Scorched Enemies.
This enemy type is the most common in the game and can be found in multiple instances. These aren’t really tough, but you need to be vigilant and careful during the fight.
Conditions
Roaming around the Wasteland is not safe by any means and you are constantly at risk of contracting a Disease or a Mutation.
From being attacked by a diseased creature to roaming around in radioactive environments, you can acquire these conditions which stay for anywhere between 15 mins to a whole hour.
That is why small things like boiling water, cooking food, sleeping on raised mattresses, and always venturing out wearing protective suits is a must.
Otherwise, contracting these conditions lead to various adverse and sometimes beneficial effects.
Challenges
No matter what you’re doing in West Virginia, there are rewards attached to most of the activities that you carry out.
These range from daily challenges to weekly ones to tasks attached to your character, their surroundings and most of the objectives that you’ll carry out anyways to survive.
Some examples include killing a certain number of enemies, collecting a specific number of resources, performing the required feat or task, etc.
You can view the status of these events and challenges on the right-hand of the screen.
Therefore, regularly check for these Challenges, as they will reward you with Atoms to purchase cosmetic items at the Atomic Ship to make your Wasteland dreams come true!
S.P.E.C.I.A.L System and Perk Cards
As you progress and level up in the game, you will earn points that you can spend on one of the stats: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck.
These different attributes will cater and play a role in the style you want to acquire in the gameplay. For e.g., if you’re looking to roam frequently in groups, then maximizing the Charisma skill tree might be better.
Otherwise, for solo play and maximizing damage and resistance, you might want to cap Intelligence at 15 points.
The maximum point cap for each stat is 30. However, along with points for the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system, you will also earn Perk Cards that will add temporary boosts or buffs to your character in different regards.
These Perk Cards are tied to and are unique to every attribute category. They vary from effects that increase weapon damage, boosts resistance to radiation and diseases, increases chances of finding materials in the wasteland and more.
The Perk Cards carry their own ‘Star’ rating or level, which is like stacking up multiple cards of the same type to increase the benefits accordingly.
Some cards like Chemist perk in Intelligence tree only has one level to upgrade it to. Other ones, like the Iran Clad in Endurance tab, will enable.
Unlike the S.P.E.C.I.A.L System, there is no level cap for Perk Cards and so you can continue to receive their benefits as long as you level up.
However, you should keep in mind that Perk Cards aren’t received on each level up after Level 10 but instead every 5 levels.
The builds that you choose to opt including weapons, gear and equipment will be centered around and be differentiated on the basis of how you choose to progress in the S.P.E.C.I.A.L system and what Perk Cards you opt for.
Base Building and General Crafting
With a greater emphasis on shelter and camping system this time around, any player who aims to excel in FO76 should get himself familiar with these features.
Since you’d spend a lot of time scavenging resources, it’s only fitting you find a safe and secure spot for harboring them.
Bases can be built anywhere in FO76, unlike the previous titles as long as you can utilize the C.A.M.P System which is a portable building mechanic.
Do note, for changing the location of the camp to your desired spot, you’ll need to sacrifice some Caps.
You may need to relocate your camp on multiple occasions including raiding attempts, dangerous creatures lurking around or especially in the case of Nuclear bombardment threats.
For this purpose, always keep blueprints with you, and plan beforehand so you can quickly re-establish your camp.
Within these bases, you can avail the essential facilities like workbenches for weapons and armor, cooking pots for cooking food, and boiling water for a safer us, and finally mattresses for resting or sleeping.
Then as we talked about previously, you’ll need to store items here to unburden yourself keeping in bounds of the weight capacity for your character.
Thus, it’s essential to utilize these facilities to stay away from the Diseases and Mutations, as well as regularly repairing weapons and giving your character a breather.
Combat
When you’re off to face some formidable monsters and mutated creatures, guns will be your best friends.
Since ammo is also a liability, you can benefit by carrying a melee weapon at all times, like the Ski Sword we mentioned above, to deal decent damage when you run out of bullets.
However, if you really insist on using firearms, ammo can be crafted over at your CAMP or Tinker Stations. Armor and Special Power suits can also provide for good defensive measures especially when it’s a long and tough fight.
The shooting system has received a few tweaks in this latest installment in the Fallout series.
The Power Armor is especially useful, and though you’ll need to be around level 40 to make use of it, you can keep them stashed in your CAMP since the pieces are hard to come by.
Specifically, V.A.T.S. now will have a variable percentage chance of damage on each body part of the opponent as your distance from them changes or as you level up more of your stats in that department.
You can also use V.A.T.S. to highlight traps like mines or enemies which cannot be seen straight away. Using VAT consumes Action Points but will fill the Critical Meter which increases the chance to land a guaranteed hit.
Workshops
When you’re low on using materials and can’t seem to carry on your search, then you may benefit from getting access to a workshop.
This is carried out when you complete optional quests which require you to kill multiple enemies you can ‘claim’ a workshop.
After building merely a few generators, the workshop will become active and you can produce special energy items and food supplies.
The Multiplayer Experience
At the end of the day, Fallout 76 is still a lot dependent and emphasized on cooperation or rivalry between real players in the game.
Collaboration is especially recommended when embarking on tough raids and enemy hideouts like the beasts i.e. Scorched, Ghouls, and Super Mutants.
There are several party options like sending invitations, chatting, expressing oneself with emotes, and more.
Of course, you don’t have to have a kind disposition at all times. Looting a player is satisfying but you’ll have to wait for 5 levels before you can start a rivalry.
This is because, before level 5, the Pacifist Mode is enabled which doesn’t allow your character to participate in these PvP elements.
You can still deactivate the Pacifist Mode later if you’re wanting to never get into a fight with a player or live dangerously.
More to that fact, should a player unnecessarily, by intention or mistake, kill a player if he hasn’t fought back, will incur a bounty and be labeled a “Murderer” in bold red letters.
So yea, you’ll always have a bunch of players on your trail to hunt you down for loot. With that said, a successful player elimination will net you some Caps.
Some Useful Tips…
- Don’t like your character’s appearance? Change it right away from the in-game menu under the ‘Change Appearance’ setting.
- Consume fewer RadAway and Stimpaks suited just to your requirement, by diluting them with purified water at the chem station. This helps you avoid consuming RadAway and Stimpaks for effects more than the health you need to regain or the radiation you need to remove.
- Duplicate weapons should be scrapped in order to acquire modifications for the existing firearms. These include knives, optics and different ammunition rounds.
- Pieces of Power Armor still awards defensive bonuses and increased carrying capacity even when you’re below level 40. Simply hop into the Power Armor chassis after removing all different pieces of it.
