Fallout 4 Exploits

Anyone who has been on Youtube looking at Fallout 4 videos is probably already familiar with the exploits on this page, but maybe there's some new ideas here for you about how to put them to best use.

After F4 patches 1.02 and 1.3, some good exploits went away, but enough remain to equalize the game.

"Equalize" means that F4 cheats the player quite often, so some way is needed to fight back. Interestingly enough, NONE of the cheats listed in the next section which F4 uses to their advantage got fixed.

F4 Doesn't Play Fair

Here are just a few of the way that F4 cheats:

Impossible spawns: You spend a couple of hours and tons of supplies building fences around a settlement, with only one opening which you guard with 20 turrets, only to have a band of Super Mutants spawn inside the settlement where you don't have ANY turrets.
Just as annoying are impossible friendly spawns: I built a nice house to get away from the annoying settlers who were hogging the workbenches and beds, and I made the house "impossible" for them to get into, so F4 just spawns them inside so that when I come back from a mission, the house is full of settlers using my workbenches and sleeping in my bed. (See Home, Sweet Home.)
[Update on Nov.2025:] There is now a wonderful mod which completely overhauls Red Rocket. Unfortunately, in my most recent game in which I vowed not to use any game breaking mods, I could not use this mod because it does have some things it adds to the game which are game breakers.
The mod Locksmith lets you lock and unlock doors. In 2025, I set up a private workshop in Sanctuary with locked doors and only a couple of times has anyone gotten in. One of those was Preston Garvey when he first came into Sanctuary to meet me, but he never came in again.
The most annoying impossible spawns are brahmin in the middle of settlements, getting in the way and crashing into everything. I've fenced a settlement only to watch then climb over the fence. I've put tall concrete walls around a settlement only to find brahmin inside after returning later.
Impossible pin breaks when lock picking: You start to pick a Novice lock and as soon as you touch it, the pin breaks. It doesn't even wiggle. If you start the new pin in the exact same place and jiggle it, the pin does NOT break. Also, the Novice locks are supposed to have a much wider sweet spot than the advanced locks, but they don't (or at least, not all the time, if ever). This is all inexcusable since lock picking is not new with F4. All they had to do was copy the code from earlier Fallouts which worked great. The bottom line is that in F4, lock picking is no longer a skill. It's not even pure luck. It is just F4 rigging the deck against you so that you have to break pins. Use the Lockpick mod if you are as fed up as I am.
I now carry the mod Skeleton Key with me. I try manually picking locks first, but if the above cheat happens, I let the mod open it.
I recenlty watched an old intro to FO4 by one of my favorite videographers of Fallout games When he came across an expert or master lock, he would say that he would come back later for it. My experience is that the contents of such safes rarely, if ever, have game-breaking contents. So I would not criticise anyone's using a mod to unlock them, and I certainly would not go to the trouble of going back for them.
Impossible settlement damage: I put a minimum of 100 Defense points into each settlement; a couple, as much as 150-200+ Defense points. When I am at a settlement, a bunch of Deathclaws can't penetrate the settlement, but if I leave the same settlement for awhile, when I come back, I can find that every single turret (there may be 50 of them spread around), every food plant, and every generator is damaged and must be repaired. This is both costly and time consuming (and boring), as well as very annoying since I know it could not have happened legitimately; F4 cheated to do this.
The mod Invulnerable Turrets helps. I also a mod which lets you craft weapons. I make a bunch of Alien Blasters and trade one with every one in my settlements. It only has a damage of 50, so it's not a game breaker, but most settlers only have a pipe pistol with a much lower damage. So far, none of my settlements have been damaged by invaders.
Impossible enemy detection: I can have maxed out sneak ability, and most of the time I can be standing right next to a foe and they still can't see me, even if I've just fired my weapon, but there are times when a foe can see me immediately, even if I'm not moving and even if I'm using a Stealth Boy. Makes no sense.
Impossible enemy shooting: Still with maxed out sneak, sometimes I can be 200 yards away from a Raider camp at night, crouched, and behind a tree. I take a shot (VATS or scoping) and "miss", yet not only can an enemy see me, but he can hit me with what turns out to be a pipe pistol or other such pea shooter.
Impossible seeing you steal: See How to Steal Without Getting Caught below.
Disappearing SPECIAL enhancements: Say that your Strength and Charisma are both 6 and you put on a suit with +2 charisma, a hat with +1, and a pair of glasses with +1. Look at Stats in your Pip-Boy and your charisma will be 10. Now put on Power Armor and Stats shows charisma as being 6. I don't know if this is a glitch or intentional, but it is not documented. I've played a lot of games in PA thinking that I was getting the benefit of the gear underneath it, such as wearing INT-increasing gear in order to get extra XP, and it turns out that I was getting nothing extra. Had I realized this, I could have been wearing armor under the PA instead of INT-increasing gear. I eventually noticed this when I was trying to buy expensive gear without using exploits and noticed the prices weren't dropping. I had to take off the PA to get charisma back up and prices down, and that is a nuisance.
Fake Friends: A group of people will be marked as non-hostile, so you put away your weapon, get out of sneak mode, and approach them, only to have them turn hostile for no reason and start shooting at you. This is not new in F4 - earlier Fallouts did it too - but it's an odd cheat on the game's part because the game is just out-and-out lying to you.

Player's Revenge

Some players are opposed to taking advantage of exploits, calling it cheating. One guy even said that saving before trying a speech check and reloading if it fails is cheating. Earlier Fallouts did not give you the opportunity to save and reload in the middle of a speech check, but they added the ability to F4.

How can it be "cheating" to use a feature intentionally added to the game, any more than it is cheating to play the game at a lower level of difficulty instead of at the most difficult level?

There is also some debate as to what is a glitch (an unintended error in the game) and what are things within the framework of the game which the creators purposely put in. Example: Everyone knows that the Lone Wanderer perk, which gives you benefits if you play without a companion, works even though you may have Dogmeat as a companion. Some people call this a glitch, but others think it was intentional. A fact in favor of this theory is that if Bethesda did not want it to work this way, they could have easily changed it, yet they have never changed it while taking out many other exploits.

And although the exploits on this are sometimes referred to as "glitches," they are not. A "glitch" is defined as an unintended malfunction. It seems likely that the Dogmeat companion exception was intended.

In marked contrast, the Vendor Exploit and several others require a particular set of actions plus unique button presses to work. They clearly are not a bug in the code but were specifically written to accomplish the exploit. Nobody knows why the exploit was included in the game; maybe just to give people something to discover. And why was the original Vendor Exploit removed in patch 1.02 and a different one added? Who knows. Maybe to give us something different to find or to replace the original one with one less drastic. (The 1.2 exploit didn't take all of a vendor's caps and inventory like the old one did, but even that exploit was removed in 1.4.)

Another type of exploit on this page involves using a perfectly legitimate action of the game in a way which was very likely not intended. For example, you can level up early in the game by scrapping Sanctuary and using the wood and/or steel to mass produce some item, scrap it all, and repeat for as long as possible. No unusual button presses are required; it simply takes advantage of routine acts of scrapping and building, but surely not in a way intended by Bethesda.

A malfunction/glitch would be if you were buying something and all of a sudden all the vendor's goods and money instantly transferred to you with no unusual actions on your part. This would more likely be a bug in the code, such as ones which make the game lock up under various circumstances.

So with that in mind, here are some exploits:

Craft Infinite Items
Duplicate building supply shipments
Building Limit
How to Steal Without Getting Caught
Save Before Speech Checks
How to Get Particular Legendary Gear

To temporarily increase Intelligence or Charisma, see this page.

To see the effects these exploits can have on your game, see this page.

Level up quickly:

Early in the game, building a settlement and crafting items generates a steady flow of XP and thus is an easy way to level up. The only problem is that the supplies needed to do a lot of building and crafting are not easy to come by.

However, all the steel and wood you can get from scrapping everything in Sanctuary is enough to level up several times. You just make as many fences (or any other item) as you can as quickly as you can. And when you run out of steel and wood, scrap the fences (you only get about half of the materials back) and do it again.

The drawback is although it lets you level up quickly, you will no longer have the supplies needed to build a settlement, but this is not a drawback if you are not planning on building settlements.

Craft Infinite Items:

The pre-mod exploits which let you craft infinite items were patched. Fortunately, for those who like to do a lot of settlement building without having to spend so much time trying to get the necessary supplies, there are mods which do this.

If you were willing to use "exploits" for this, it's nitpicking to NOT use mods for the same purpose.

The same is true for the now-patched exploit for duplicating building supply shipments.

If you don't have the caps to buy the shipment you want to duplicate, buy a cheaper shipment and duplicate it enough times to trade for the one you want. Likewise, you can duplicate a lot more than you need and use the excess to trade for high-priced weapons, armor, etc.

Building Limit:

If you go nuts building a big settlement, the Size bar at the upper right corner in the Build mode will eventually fill up and you will be told that you cannot build anything else in that settlement.

An exploit to get around that is to drop all your weapons on the ground, go into the Build mode, and Store them in the settlement's workbench. Doing this slowly brings down the Size meter. You can get them back from the workbench and repeat the process as much as you want.

How to steal without getting caught (usually):

In earlier Fallouts, you could steal without getting caught even when someone was watching. Look at the item up close and hold the action button (A on the Xbox One).to pick it up. Walk off with it and nobody seems to care. Take it to where nobody is watching, drop it, then pick it up normally to steal it.

Sometimes this works in F4; other times, it doesn't. In the School in Diamond City, a guard had his back to me. I stole some little something just to see what would happen. He turned around and started shooting.

So I reloaded and tried the exploit of picking it up and taking it to where he couldn't see me. When I came back around the corner, he turned around and started shooting. I tried this again another time and it worked.

The bottom line is: save before trying this exploit.

A better way to try this is to use a Stealth Boy, which I have never used in F4 otherwise. For example, at the Prydwen's armory, go around the corner and use the Stealth Boy, pick the lock, go in and carry the Gauss Rifle (or whatever else you want) back around the corner, then drop it and pick it up into your inventory.

The worst possible place to try to steal in F4 is the tower at Bunker Hill. At the top of the tower is a magazine, which you can safely pick up, and several items of loot which are marked in red.

I went there at night to meet Old Man Stockton. Afterwards, I went up to get the magazine. It's a long climb up the stairs to the top, so I felt safe stealing a gold flip-top lighter. When I got down, the guard and Stockton were gunning for me so I took off running to do Stockton's mission, hoping they would forget about me.

I waited at the church for Stockton as part of his mission. He showed up, but he was still gunning for me. So I reloaded a prior save and went back to Bunker Hill to run some tests:

Just taking the magazine was fine with everyone, as might be expected since it was not red.
Next I picked up the lighter, carried it down the stairs away from all windows then dropped it. Again, nobody minded.
I went back and got it into my inventory and everyone was gunning for me again.

This is all completely contrary to how stealing and carrying worked in F3 and F:NV. Plus, it makes absolutely no sense that the NPCs could magically know that I stole something when it was impossible for them to see me doing it, but there it is: F4/Bethesda cheating again.

So if you find yourself tempted in such a situation, be sure to save first.

Save Before Speech Checks:

When talking to someone, you will sometimes see speech options highlighted in different colors, based on the odds of your reply being accepted which, in turn, is based on how high your charisma is. See this page for info about how to increase charisma.

Even if your charisma is high enough that the odds are 90% in your favor, that means that 10% of the time you will fail. The best way to get into Vault 81 at an early level to get the Overseer's Guardian is to pass a speech check.

In F4, you can save before choosing a response, then if it fails, you can reload and try again. Someone online told me that this is cheating, but that really illustrates how "cheating" is in the mind of the player. In some games, all saves are done at fixed points only and if you get killed, the game restarts you at the last fixed point. You can lose a lot of progress.

F4 lets you save at will, so if you get killed after having just saved, you don't lose any progress. Is that cheating? I believe that virtually everyone would say no. So why is it cheating to save before a speech check? At least you have some control over whether or not you die. You have absolutely no control over whether or not you pass a speech check; it's random.

Neither F3 nor F:NV allow saving and reloading while in the middle of dialogues, so clearly Bethesda added it to F4 for the sole purpose of saving before speech checks, so it would crazy not to do so.

You will usually (but not always) want to try speech check responses because at the very least, passing one gives you XP. But another reason for saving first is that you may pass, but the consequences may not be what good for you.

A typical example is when an option is "Ask for money." You try it, pass, and then an option is "Ask for more." If you fail, the amount the person will pay reverts back to the original amount, or he may call the whole deal off.

If a speech check comes up during a conversation, you can't save before answering while the speech options are displayed. Just back up until they disappear, save, then move forward again until the speech options reappear.

Reminder: These pages do not apply to the patch 1.5 Survival Mode, and obviously, you cannot save before Speech Checks because you have to sleep in a bed to save.

How to Get Particular Legendary Gear:

This exploit is similar to the last one in that it involves saving and reloading until you get what you want.

Farming at its simplest is just reloading the last save if you kill a legendary enemy and it doesn't have gear that you want. Because of the variety of gear and the even wider variety of special "magical" features which legendary gear might have, it can take a long, long time to find the specific type of gear with the specific feature that you want.

Loot Locking is a technique of saving and raloading which lets you "lock in" a particular type of weapon once you get one of its type and then reloading will always respawn that weapon but with a different feature each time until you get the one you want.

Loot locking requires several things to work satisfactorily:

A high level. Here's a quote from Reddit.com: So level seems to play the biggest part in farming. In the Abandoned House area, wissen2 never saw a legendary mob when he was level 59. When he got to 61 is when the legendary started to spawn.
The type of enemy (also from Reddit; "mob" = "foes"): Level gives you access to high caliber weapons limited to what the mob can offer/drop which is the last factor in the quality of loot drop. Different kinds of Legendary mobs (e.g. Ghouls, Humans, Mutants) offer different, certain group of legendary loot and effects. The rank of the legendary mob determines the caliber of the weapons available. Like for example, a Legendary Ghoul Reaper drops Hunting Rifles and Combat Rifles while a Bloated Glowing One drops Assault Rifles and Gauss Rifles and again, all dependent on the player's level. Low level players don't have access to Gauss Rifles and etc.
The location: It needs to be a place known to spawn legendary foes.
Game difficulty. The theory is that more legendary foes will spawn if you set difficulty to Survival. If you normally play at less than Survival mode, you can set it back when you are done. If you have the Spray n' Pray, killing legendary foes on Survival presents no problem.
The correct procedure must be followed for loot locking. Unfortunately, I've seen many different procedures described. Here are steps which seem to work (assuming you meet the other criteria above):

Here is a video on Youtube which does a good job of explaining the steps..

Fallout 4 Exploits

F4 Doesn't Play Fair

Player's Revenge

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