Fallout New Vegas

Almost everything the Courier is, in New Vegas, is a number on a Pip-Boy screen, and the game is unusually frank about who gets paid when one of those numbers moves. The first set is free and settled before you have set foot in the Mojave. After that every point has a price: a level, a book lying on a shelf in a vault, the short life of a magazine's bonus, four thousand caps at a clinic, or a keystroke on the tilde key that quietly switches your achievements off. Our pages on this game cover each of those prices and not much else, so this guide is organised by what you are trying to change and who you have to see about it.

Before you leave Goodsprings

The free numbers are settled as you create your character, before you make your way into the Mojave, and they are the ones people search for first. Our attributes and skills page walks the seven attributes and the thirteen skills they seed, and its advice on a starting spread is short: Intelligence sets how many skill points a level gives you, Luck touches every skill and your critical rate, and nothing should be pushed to its ceiling on day one because the game keeps offering ways to raise it. You also tag three skills for a head start. The traits and statistics page lists the ten optional trades, from Built to Destroy's crit chance against faster gear wear to Wild Wasteland, which changes what some of the map contains, and then explains the figures the sheet works out for itself, such as Action Points, Carry Weight and the 85% ceiling on Damage Resistance. How those two pages, the perks list and crafting fit together by how often each one lets you change your mind is the subject of our traits, perks and SPECIAL guide.

Levelling on the road

Every level pays skill points; every second one pays a perk, and the perks page is the one to keep open while you level. It tables 86 standard perks with their level, their attribute or skill requirement and their ranks, then adds the eight perks a companion brings with them, the ten that reward a companion's own quest, eighteen challenge perks (sixteen of them earned by repeating one action a set number of times, the other two by a pair of quests and by four acts of cannibalism), nine implants and four unarmed moves taught by other characters. The shape of the big table is worth knowing before you plan: it is heaviest between levels 6 and 12 and thins to one perk a level past 22. One perk in five asks for nothing but the level, and the rest read your sheet, which is why the attribute you skimped on at creation tends to surface as a locked perk around level 16.

Reading your way past a skill check

When a lock or a terminal or a conversation wants five more points than you have, the map can supply them. Our skill books page lists 79 pickups across fourteen titles, every one of which raises a skill for good, and our skill magazines page covers the fourteen titles that lend a temporary bonus, ten points to one skill for thirteen of them and 5% critical chance for the last, none of which stack, with a vending machine on the Strip that never runs out of random ones. Because both pages are alphabetical, our items guide reorders the books, the magazines and the unique weapons by place, so you can see that a single Dead Money casino holds a dozen different pickups and that Camp McCarran and Camp Golf are magazine racks. Two cheap perks, Comprehension and Retention, improve the return on both kinds of reading.

Buying the rest

The only shop that sells attribute points is the New Vegas Medical Clinic, where Doctor Usanagi's implants cost 4,000 caps for each of the seven SPECIAL scores, 8,000 for four points of Damage Threshold under the skin and 12,000 for a slow trickle of regenerating health. She is one of thirty-one names on our doctors and vendors page, which files every doctor, bartender and food seller by the sector of the map they stand in. Worn weapons and armor have their own list: the nine people on our repairers page each carry a repair skill figure from 30 up to 100, and four of them sit at the top of that range, none of them inside the city. The doctors, vendors and repairers guide lays the two lists over each other sector by sector and answers the repair questions people actually type.

If you would rather owe nobody, the benches do the same work for parts. Our crafting page sorts the three stations by what they make: the workbench for weapons, armor, medicine and repair kits, the reloading bench for turning poor ammunition into good from lead, powder and primer, and campfires and electric hot plates for cooking. All three read your skills rather than your level, with Repair wanted anywhere from 20 to 75 depending on the recipe.

Guns worth the detour

Our unique weapons page walks forty-two named weapons and where each is. About a dozen are in somebody's hands, which makes them a conversation or a fight rather than a search: Benny's pistol Maria, Legate Lanius's blade, the Lonesome Drifter's magnum, Old Lady Gibson's shotgun, Dead Sea's Liberator in Nelson. Three come only at the end of a quest, and three, the Alien Blaster, a Gauss rifle and a batch of Holy Frag Grenades in a church basement, only exist if you have the Wild Wasteland trait, which is the clearest case in the game of a line on your sheet changing what the map contains.

When the PC version misbehaves

The other half of our coverage is about the game as a program. The error and crash fixes page was written in launch week and still holds the workarounds people pass around: an iFPSClamp of 60 for stutter, bUseThreadedAI and iNumHWThreads for freezes, renaming the .bak files to recover a save that keeps reverting, removing the FFDSHOW codec when dialogue stutters, and a compatibility-mode fix for a launcher that will not start. The tweaks page goes deeper into the INI files for the field of view, mouse acceleration, HUD position, grass and water detail, and the cell buffers that decide how much of the Mojave stays loaded around you. Theconsole commands and cheats page carries the command list itself, from player.modav and player.additem to the god mode toggle, with the form IDs for aid, ammunition, books, weapons and perks, and leaves the INI side to the tweaks page. One caveat both pages repeat: use the console and Steam stops handing out achievements. For the game as it is played in 2026, our best mods page puts the engine fixes first, the script extender, the 4GB patcher and the tick fix, before any texture pack or quest mod, and gives the install order that keeps them from fighting. For completeness, the community patches post records the fan-made bug fix compilation that circulated in the game's first weeks, after the developer's own patch had closed around 200 bugs; treat it as a piece of the game's history rather than a current download.

Beyond the sheet

Our pages on this game began with the Courier's sheet and the machine it runs on, and the rest has since been filled in. The walkthrough follows the main quest from Goodsprings to The Tops and then down all four routes to Hoover Dam, with the checks that shorten each one. The companions page covers the eight who will walk it with you and what each one asks before joining, and the Benny page the man waiting at the end of the first third. The DLC guide takes the four expansions in turn, with the level each one warns you about and the door that closes behind you in the Sierra Madre; the builds page turns the attributes, traits and perks pages into five finished characters; and the weapons page sorts every class by skill, ammunition and requirement, with the unique variant named beside each. One page answers a question the game cannot: Darla, the Novac shopkeeper the Ghoul remembers in Fallout Season 2, is not in it, and that page says who is. Start with the attributes page, take the perks table with you, and let the walkthrough decide where you walk next.